Firefox 3.0b4 and multiple Firefox versions on OS X

Firefox is a pig.  Well, it was a pig, and now, as of Firefox 3.0b4, it's a piglet.

Since November, I've been using Safari as my main browser, and hauling out Firefox for particular sites that don't work in Safari or for when I needed Firebug.  As of last week, I've changed back to Firefox.

I wouldn't say Firefox necessarily uses less memory than Safari now, but it stopped being worth having both of them open.  Firefox 3.0b4 not only uses much less memory than before, but it reclaims memory better.  I've had about three crashes, but none in the past few days.

Before I realised that you could just use the Firebug 1.1 beta, I thought I wanted to run both Firefox 2 and Firefox 3.0b4.  It turns out to be fairly easy.  Rename the Firefox 2 application to something imaginative like Firefox2.  Create a simple shell script named firefox.sh (or whatever you want):

#!/bin/sh

MYDIR=`dirname "$0"`
cd "${MYDIR}"
./firefox-bin -P firefox2 "$@"

Copy that shell script into Firefox2.app/Contents/MacOS on the command line, or right-click on Firefox2 in Finder, select "Show Package Contents", and paste it into the Contents/MacOS directory.

From the command line, run "open Info.plist" in the Contents directory, or simply double-click it in Finder.  Change the Root/CFBundleExecutable to firefox.sh (or whatever you called it).

You can now run the Firefox2.app application and use "Keep in Dock" on it.  The first time you run it, it will show the profile manager.  Create a profile named "firefox2".  You can install Firefox 2 add-ons and so forth without interfering with your Firefox 3.0b4 install.  Or so it seems so far, at least.