How to install Firefox 3 without borking your Firefox 2 installation (it’s easy!)

In my work I need to view web­sites as my audi­ences do. Which means I need to have vari­ous browsers and con­fig­ur­a­tions avail­able to me. This is a Win­dows-only How-to, as my work envir­on­ment is not mine to design.

Yes­ter­day Moz­illa released Fire­fox 3 after a robust pub­lic beta peri­od. On my pro­duc­tion machine, I try to avoid installing beta soft­ware, lest any unto­ward issues pooch my pay-generating-device 🙂

So I need to run Fire­fox 2 and 3 off the same machine. I needed to install Fire­fox 3 without break­ing my Fire­fox 2 install­a­tion.

Here’s how I did it.

• Launch Fire­fox 2 from the com­mand line using the fol­low­ing:
  /path/to/firefox -profilemanager -no-remote
  This will open the Fire­Fox 2 pro­file man­ager. Remem­ber that ‘-no-remote’ para­met­er, we’ll need that again later. It isol­ates each run­ning ver­sion of Fire­Fox from each other.
• Cre­ate a new pro­file for use exclus­ively with Fire­Fox 3. I called mine ‘Firefox3’ . Make sure you uncheck the ‘Don’t ask at star­tup’ box to ensure you are presen­ted with a choice when you launch Fire­Fox. The idea with the second pro­file is to keep your set­tings, tweaks, exten­sions, and all oth­er cus­tom­iz­a­tions you’ve made in Fire­fox 2 from being changed by Fire­fox 3.
• Rename your ‘default’ pro­file to Firefox2. This is the default pro­file you’ve likely been using up to now. Renam­ing will make it easi­er to dif­fer­en­ti­ate profiles.
• Install Fire­fox 3. You’ll need to select the ‘cus­tom’ install­a­tion option and cre­ate / select a dif­fer­ent dir­ect­ory for Fire­fox 3. This is to pre­vent the Fire­fox 3 install­a­tion pro­cess from over­writ­ing Fire­fox 2. Also Uncheck the Use Fire­fox as my default browser box. DO NOT start Fire­fox 3 as the last step of the install­a­tion pro­ced­ure. Uncheck the ‘Launch Fire­fox now’ check­box and Fin­ish your installation.
• Find the Fire­fox 3 short­cut and view its Prop­er­ties. Select the Short­cut tab. Add -no-remote -p firefox3 to the end of the text in the Tar­get: box. It should read some­thing (not exactly) like this:
  "C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox 3\firefox.exe" -no-remote -p firefox3
  You’re telling Fire­fox 3 to launch a new instance and use the pro­file named ‘firefox3’
• Find your Fire­fox 2 short­cut and repeat the step you just did for Fire­fox 3 — append that text to the Tar­get: box text mak­ing changes where appro­pri­ate (IE: Firefox3 becomes Firefox2. This will keep Fire­fox 2 and 3 from noti­cing each oth­er allow­ing you to run both at the same time, if you wish.
• Note: Now when you launch Fire­fox 2 or 3, you may be aler­ted that the ver­sion you’ve just star­ted is not the default browser. That’s ok and to be expec­ted. Depend­ing on your need, you can make one the default browser and have it auto­ma­gic­ally launch when you click a link in email, or through oth­er applic­a­tion. I’m leav­ing Fire­fox 2 as my default browser until I am very com­fort­able with 3.

My obser­va­tions:

• Fire­fox 3 is new, fresh out of beta. Expect the unexpected
• Not all plug-ins and exten­sions are compatible.

Your turn. What do you think of Fire­fox 3? What works and does­n’t? Did this install­a­tion walk­through help?