I recently upgraded to Snow Leopard and made the decision NOT to use multiple user accounts and the “fast user switching” feature. There are several reasons I chose to avoid multiple accounts, but sharing data (iPhoto, iTunes, Calendar, and Address Book) is the primary reason. It can be done, but it can also be a huge pain in the posterior. Having multiple users operating under the same user account isn’t all that bad. However, there is one huge irritation. Namely, it is extremely frustrating to constantly log in and out of websites such as Gmail, Facebook and Google Reader.
My first solution to this problem was to let Firefox save my user names and passwords. This is something I have never done in the past, and was still not comfortable with. Still, it made the process somewhat smoother. Then I started to wonder if there was a way to have multiple instances of Firefox running at the same time and I accidentally ran across the Firefox Profile Manager when I downloaded MultiFirefox. MultiFirefox is an app that allows you to run multiple versions of Firefox on the same machine. The app is really for developers, and isn’t exactly what I was looking for, but it utilizes the Firefox Profile Manager which I didn’t even know existed. Let me emphasize that this was an accident! I don’t understand for the life of me why this feature is not obviously visible. At all events, I had MultiFirefox running so I used it to access the profile manager (rather than using the terminal), and created two profiles. I should note that when I ran the profile manager from the terminal I was unable to access the GUI controls. I don’t know what the problem was, but using MultiFirefox I was able to create my profiles. When you access the profile manager to create your profiles you have to be sure to untick the check box that says “don’t ask at startup” IF you plan on choosing which profile to open each time you run Firefox.app. I did this for about 60 seconds before it occurred to me that there must be a way to create an alias that would open a specific profile by passing it the appropriate parameters. It turns out you can’t. What you can do (thanks Anthony!) is create a shell script that will do the job. Through much trial and error, and rather prodigious use of Google, I discovered there is a bug that prevents the usual terminal command from running properly on my machine. I think it has something to do with the combination of Firefox 3.5 and Snow Leopard. Rather than go into the details lets just say that if the usual command does not work on your system, you may need to create an AppleScript that executes the following shell script: “do shell script “/Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/firefox-bin -P XXX &> /dev/null &” where XXX = the name of your profile. Now I can dump a Firefox icon on top of both my scripts, dump them in the dock and I’m all set.UPDATE: I ran into another issue. I dropped both scripts on the dock (two icons), then I opened both profiles resulting in two instances of Firefox (two more icons), at this point I had FOUR FireFox icons in the dock…not good. This is the solution I chose. I set the profile manager to NOT show the actual profile manager dialog box when Firefox starts up. This has the effect of opening the default profile when you click on the Firefox icon in the dock (one icon). I then dropped the script for the second profile in the doc with a different firefox icon (one icon). Now there are two icons in the dock and each user simply closes Firefox when done with their session.