c0xc / new-firefox

Create temporary Firefox sessions.

new-firefox

Create temporary Firefox sessions.

To log into any site while surfing, you might want to use a different Firefox session to prevent tracking. Firefox does have an option to open one or more private windows, but different private windows share the same set of cookies, they all represent one private session. Also, all Firefox windows belong to the same process. If this process is already using 1 GB of your RAM, a new process would be a lot faster than the old memory hog.

This script starts a new Firefox process with a temporary profile, which is automatically deleted afterwards. When a temporary profile is deleted, the cookies from that session are gone as well, just like those from a private session when the last private window is closed. For example, it could be used to start 3 temporary Firefox sessions to log into one site with 3 different names.

This tool starts Firefox in safe mode, with all addons disabled. This is done because the temporary profile is not a perfect copy of the default profile, therefore some addons might cause trouble. It was observed that a bookmark sync addon failed to load the bookmarks in a temporary profile and then started a sync, deleting all of them on the server.

Please note that this is just a cheap script, with minimal error handling. Don't expect the temporary Firefox sessions to work perfectly.

Installation

Just copy this thing into your local ~/bin directory and drop the suffix. Then, when starting Firefox (hit Alt + F2 or whatever), enter "new-firefox".

Firefox will show a dialog informing you that it's being started in safe mode. So it'll be obvious that this is a separate Firefox session.

Cleanup

Normally, this tool will create a temporary profile and delete that profile when Firefox is closed. However, this tool might fail to do so due to a bug or a crash. In such a case, the temporary profile should be deleted manually.

Navigate to $HOME/.mozilla/firefox/. Look for directories named "tempX.profile", where X is a number. These are temporary profile directories. You can safely delete those, once all Firefox sessions are closed. Don't delete any other files or directories.

Then, open the file called profiles.ini and look for config sections that have a "Path" key which points to a "tempX.profile" directory. Remove these sections. Keep the other sections as they are.

Gory details

This tool creates a temporary profile directory in $HOME/.mozilla/firefox/. The directory is always named "tempX.profile", where X is a positive integer. X is the directory number, which isn't really an index but rather a number used to form a unique directory name. Also, a profile section for this temporary profile is added to the config file called profiles.ini. Each section name contains a number, which is the section index. When one or more temporary sessions are created, their section indexes and directory numbers usually match. As soon as a session is closed while sessions with higher indexes are still running, their section indexes will be decreased. Failure to do so would lead to a gap in the profile section array, which in turn would cause Firefox to show the profile chooser dialog. When closed, this profile chooser may reset the config file by removing all temporary profile sections.

Author

Philip Seeger ([email protected])

License

Please see the file called LICENSE.