On Windows, the Firefox installer (quite considerately) won’t override existing non-beta versions of the browser with a beta version (like the recently released Firefox 3.6 betas). Though it doesn’t explicitly say so, Mac OS X users can have a similar behavior, which by the surprised faces I see when I tell people this, many people don’t know about.
It’s simple:
- Grab a Firefox beta download, then mount the disk image
- Instead of dragging the Firefox app to your Applications folder, drag it to your desktop temporarily
- Highlight the app on your desktop, hit the return key, and give it a new name (like “Firefox 3.6 Beta”)
- Drag the newly renamed app to your Applications folder
You can then run these two Firefox versions with little interaction between the two. I say ‘little’ because they will share the same profile (where your bookmarks, extensions and the like are kept), and so cannot be run at the same time. This has the plus side of meaning you won’t have to re-import bookmarks and such, but you will have to sit through a harmless extension compatibility check whenever you start a different version of Firefox than was last run.
[...] You can find Brad’s original blog post here. [...]
Neat tip. Thanks!