Front end to manage multiple Firefox instances?

Question

Firefox recently rolled out a feature called container tabs, which sounds awesome. However, you have to have Quantum to use it, and I don't want to use Quantum.

There's always been a way to have multiple instances of Firefox, but you had to mess around with profiles, and that always seemed too clunky for me to fool with, so it got backburnered.

Earlier this week, I came across a GUI front end to make the profile management easier to get multiple Firefox instances up and running. This is awesome, and I want to use it. However, today I can't seem to find it. I thought it was called Multifox, but that's a different thing.

As I recall:

• it was a GUI front end for Firefox profiles
• leveraged Firefox Portable
• the developer had his own website in addition to a Git repository
• the software was also posted on Softonic, Softpedia, and/or Sourceforge
• there were articles on Lifehacker, HowtoGeek, and some other popular techy blogs explaining features and how-tos

Yet today, I can't find it. No idea if that topic is shadowbanned, I'm shadowbanned, or what. When I found it the other day, it was surprisingly everywhere. I have searched for something like this off and on for year or two, and was ecstatic to have found what I wanted.

Is there such a software? Or did I misread the info on Multifox?

Answer 1

I kept looking and found it again: MultiFirefox. Though, I must have missed the part where it was Mac-only. It's Python though, so it might be possible to get it on Windows. Though by that time, I could just manage the profiles manually.

MultiFirefox, originally developed in 2006, is a small launcher utility that allows you to run multiple versions of Firefox side-by-side. It helps you set up multiple profiles (one or more for each version of Firefox), remembers your last launch preferences for easy launching, has auto-updating built in for when we make improvements, and is 100% open source, MIT licensed.

It is written natively in Objective-C, but was originally written in Python and wxPython. Posted below are links to all of the pertinent downloads.

MultiFirefox has been downloaded hundreds of thousands of times since its inception, and discussed on Lifehacker (in 2008!!) and made their top downloads, was a staff pick on Apple’s downloads site, and was (and still is) used by some of the Firefox development team at Mozilla.