Netxus Foundries

Firefox is a great browser and is also a great development tool in itself. There are some problems though with the numerous extension available to developers. They are a great resource when programming but they slow down (and in some scenarios they might even break) our normal web browsing.

So the idea is to have a normal Firefox installation to use as our browser and then a separate install (and profile) used only for development purposes. This way we can install tons of development related addons without worrying about slowing down our normal browsing. Of course this is only useful if you use Firefox as your primary browser.

• Download the Firefox installer
• Launch the installer
• Set the destination folder to c:\dev\Develfox
• Uncheck the options to create shortcuts on desktop, start menu…
• Uncheck the option to launch Firefox on finishing the setup
• Go to the installation directory and start a command prompt there
  • Run Firefox with the following command: firefox.exe -no-remote -ProfileManager
    • Create a new profile and name it Devel
    • Exit the profile manager
  • Create a new batch file name develfox.bat with the following contents. It’ll copy on each run the firefox executable to develfox.exe so we can tell it apart from our normal browser on the task manager (we copy it on each run so that automatic updates are correctly applied).
    @echo off
copy “c:\dev\develfox\firefox.exe” “c:\dev\develfox\develfox.exe” > null
start “” “c:\dev\develfox\develfox.exe” -no-remote -P “Devel”

• Still on the installation directory go to chrome and create in there a directory named icons and inside that one another called default. Put in there a custom icon with the name main-window.ico to be used as the application icon. Check out IconBase for some nice ones.
• Create a shortcut on your desktop or another suitable place and use the following properties:
  • Target: c:\dev\develfox\develfox.bat
  • Start in: c:\dev\develfox
  • Change the icon to the one used in c:\dev\develfox\chrome\icons\default\main-window.ico
• Launch the shortcut to execute our new Firefox installation. It’ll be a vanilla one so now it’s time to install our development addons ( Firebug, Webdev toolbar, Yslow, Clearcache, Venkman… ) and also a custom theme so we can easily know in which firefox we are at each moment.
• To further customize our new Firefox installation we can install the Firesomething addon, which allows to change the window title to anything we want.