Firefox 3, Developing and Browsing

Posted on by lhl


I tend to leave a lot of tabs open when I’m browsing (mostly because of a lack of good research/organizing tools – but that’s another day’s post). Right now for example, I have 231 tabs open in 36 windows (I’ve been working on a counting extension which I should be releasing soon).

Firefox 3 has been great for my style of browsing – the Session Restore is more reliable, and overall it’s much zippier and generally more stable. The last part however comes with a caveat: I’ve found that while FF3 is more stable on a fresh install, the instability caused by extensions has also greatly increased. A few weeks ago, after it got particularly bad, I made a fresh profile, moved my data over, and now just have Adblock Plus and Filterset.G installed. This has seemed to work pretty well for my day to day browsing.

But what about development? Glad you asked. I now have a separate copy of Firefox 3 in my Applications folder named “Firefox Dev” that runs a separate “Development” profile – John Resig has a good writeup on how to set this up. To help reduce confusion when app switching, I also replaced the ICNS file with an alternate set (copy the new firefox.icns file into FFDev.app/Contents/Resources/).

And now I’m free to run lots of leaky/beta (but useful for dev) extensions in a separate process:

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