Run Firefox 5+ and Firefox 3.6 side by side on Windows

(Edit: Corrected instructions so that HTTP links in other apps will still open in Firefox.)

There’s an intranet application that I need to use that does not work in Firefox 4, Firefox 5, Chrome, Opera, or Safari. It also runs painfully slowly in Microsoft Internet Explorer 8. Since it does support Firefox 3.6, I thought I’d try running two different versions of Firefox side by side.

1. Install Firefox if you don’t have it. At the time of writing, the latest stable version is Firefox 5.
2. Download Firefox 3.6.
3. Start the installation and choose the Custom installation type.
4. Install it to a non-standard location such as “C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox 3.6\”
5. I recommend telling it to not create any shortcuts, as it will otherwise overwrite the Firefox 5 shortcuts.
6. Open up the folder where you keep your Firefox shortcuts. Make a copy of one of them.
7. Right-click -> Properties and add -ProfileManager to the target path (not the “Start in” field)
• "C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe" -ProfileManager
8. Make sure Firefox is closed and launch that shortcut. It will open up the Firefox Profile Manager.
9. Create a new profile. Name it something like: Firefox36
10. Close the Profile Manager.
11. Configure the main shortcut as follows:
• Mozilla Firefox
• "C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe" -P default
• "C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\"
• Note: An earlier version of this post added the -no-remote parameter to the command line above. This prevented HTML links in other applications (e.g. Outlook, Lotus Notes) from using this browser. You only need to set it on one of the two shortcuts, and I’ve modified the instructions accordingly with the assumption that this shortcut is to your primary browser.
12. Configure the other shortcut as follows:
• Mozilla Firefox 3.6
• "C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox 3.6\firefox.exe" -P Firefox36 -no-remote
• "C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox 3.6\"
13. Voila!

Links

• Firefox command line arguments

Find out public information about the people you email with Rapportive

Rapportive is a great browser enhancement for Gmail. It automatically looks up email addresses and populates a sidebar with that person’s profile photo (from Google Talk or Flickr), job title (from LinkedIn), tweets, as well as links to their profiles on Facebook, Skype, etc.

I find it especially useful when reading mailing list messages, as it  lets me easily find the twitter accounts of interesting people.

It’s also useful for making you think critically about the information you have exposed online. By looking at your own profile, you can find out if there’s any information that you are exposing without meaning to. In my own case, I was surprised to see my ancient Flickr account from circa 2003 on it which I’ve since made private.

I think it ties in nicely with IBM’s recent study that 21% of email users would consider applications to complement email. Lotus is also cooking up a lot of neat things that integrate social media with email. A hat tip goes to Marius for the link.

Enable vertical tabs in Google Chrome

Note: Google unfortunately chose to remove the Side Tabs feature in Chrome 16. The instructions below will not work.

***

I am a big fan of using vertical tabs in my browsing. Vertical tabs have several advantages:

• Their titles are always readable, even with 40 tabs open.
• They free up precious vertical space for content. This is especially important on widescreen monitors.
• They are easy to click on, being consistently big and predictably positioned.

I got addicted to them back when I used Opera. They followed me to Firefox with its excellent Tree Style Tab extension (and the Vertical Tabs extension in Firefox 4). Now that Chrome tempts me to switch with its amazing performance, it’s great that I can configure it to have vertical tabs too.

There are two steps to enabling them.

First, enter about:flags in your address bar. Enable “Side Tabs” and restart Chrome.

Second, right-click on a tab and choose “Use side tabs”.

Welcome to the wonderful world of vertical tabs!

Remove Facebook suggestions

One of the Facebook annoyances that cannot be disabled is the list of people that you don’t want to friend and whose walls you don’t want to write on that is in the the top right corner of its front page.

It’s easy to hide this impertinent design element.

On Firefox, you should install the Stylish extension.

On other browsers, you should follow the respective instructions.

Once you have Stylish installed:
1. Go to Facebook
2. Click on the Stylish icon in the status bar
3. Choose Write new style > For facebook.com

In the dialog:
1. Name the new style “Facebook”
2. Paste in the following code:

#pymk_hp_box {
display:none !important;
}

You should be able to save now and no longer be subjected to the Facebook Suggestions box. Unfortunately, this code may not survive the inevitable Facebook layout change.

Technical note: The wrapping code that you see in the screenshot above was generated by Stylish and will likely only work in Firefox. If you wish to adapt it in a different browser, you may want to replace the @-moz-document with @-o-document (for Opera), @-webkit-document (for Safari and Chrome), or @document once CSS3 is ratified and vendor-specific implementations merge.

Links

- Stylish extension for Firefox
- UserStyles.org
- About.com on user stylesheets (somewhat old)