{"id":64,"date":"2007-12-13T19:36:23","date_gmt":"2007-12-14T01:36:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.visualfuture.com\/davetech\/2007\/12\/13\/creating-a-second-firefox-profile-for-seo\/"},"modified":"2008-12-03T10:41:58","modified_gmt":"2008-12-03T16:41:58","slug":"creating-a-second-firefox-profile-for-seo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.visualfuture.com\/davetech\/2007\/12\/13\/creating-a-second-firefox-profile-for-seo\/","title":{"rendered":"Creating a second FireFox profile for SEO"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Note: A link to instructions for Mac users is at the bottom of this post -s<\/p>\n<p>\nI started reading up on how to develop a FireFox Extension and one of the first recommendations is to create a separate FireFox profile.  The second profile is recommended so you don&#8217;t have to clutter up your &#8220;regular&#8221; FireFox profile with a bunch of debuggers and development tools.  And, both profiles can be run at the same time.  This got me thinking about other uses for 2 profiles:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Having 2 profiles would allow you to be logged into 2 different Google accounts at the same time.\n<\/li>\n<li>You could run keyphrase searches and view &#8220;personalized&#8221; vs generic SERPs.\n<\/li>\n<li>Run one profile through a proxy service to see if your IP address is being served alternate content.\n<\/li>\n<li>Compare different extensions, security settings.  Manage an alternate set of bookmarks, etc.\n<\/li>\n<li>Keep your &#8220;work&#8221; &#038; &#8220;personal&#8221; browsing history separate.\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Here&#8217;s the setup for Windows, using FireFox 2.x. I&#8217;ll try to add the Mac version shortly<\/p>\n<ol>\n<li>Make sure you close all FireFox windows.  In FireFox, &#8220;File => Exit&#8221; should to the trick.\n<\/li>\n<li>Run the FireFox Profile Manager.  Click on the Windows &#8220;Start&#8221; button, then choose &#8220;Run&#8221;  Type firefox.exe -ProfileManager in the box next to &#8220;Open&#8221; and then click the &#8220;OK&#8221; button.\n<p><img src='https:\/\/www.visualfuture.com\/davetech\/wp-content\/uploads\/2007\/12\/run.gif' alt='Run the FireFox Profile Manager' \/><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li>Create a new profile.  Just click &#8220;Create,&#8221; give it the name seo &#038; hit &#8220;Finish.&#8221;\n<p><img src='https:\/\/www.visualfuture.com\/davetech\/wp-content\/uploads\/2007\/12\/create_profile.gif' alt='Create a seo FireFox profile' \/><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p>Now that the new profile is created, you need a way to run that profile along with your &#8220;default&#8221; profile.  At this point, any of your usual methods of starting FireFox should bring up your &#8220;default&#8221; profile.  I&#8217;m going to roll a couple tips into one here, so you&#8217;ll end up with a way to run your &#8220;seo&#8221; profile AND give it the shiny icon of your choice.<\/p>\n<ol>\n<li>Open Notepad: Start => Programs => Accessories => Notepad\n<\/li>\n<li>enter the following in Notepad:\n<pre>set MOZ_NO_REMOTE=1\r\nstart \"\" \"%ProgramFiles%\\Mozilla Firefox\\firefox.exe\" -P seo<\/pre>\n<\/li>\n<li>Make sure that the text after -P in the second line is the same as the profile name you created.\n<\/li>\n<li>Save the file in your &#8220;My Documents&#8221; folder, and name it &#8220;firefoxSEO.bat&#8221;\n<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p>Double-clicking the &#8220;firefoxSEO.bat&#8221; file will launch FireFox with your &#8220;seo&#8221; profile.  So technically, we&#8217;re done and you can start running two FireFox profiles side-by-side right now. But as you can see, the default icon for .bat files is pretty ugly.  And there&#8217;s no easy way to change it.  The default icon can also be a problem later on, if you want to create even more profiles, and would like individual icons for each profile.<\/p>\n<p>The solution is to create a shortcut to &#8220;firefoxSEO.bat,&#8221; and give it any icon you like!<\/p>\n<ol>\n<li>Right-click on &#8220;firefoxSEO.bat&#8221; and choose the &#8220;Create Shortcut&#8221; option.\n<\/li>\n<li>Move and\/or copy the shortcut anywhere you like: your desktop, shortcut bar, QuickLaunch bar, etc.\n<\/li>\n<li>Now, right-click on the shortcut, and choose &#8220;Properties.&#8221;\n<\/li>\n<li>On the second tab &#8220;Shortcut&#8221; click the button labeled &#8220;Change Icon&#8221;\n<p><img src='https:\/\/www.visualfuture.com\/davetech\/wp-content\/uploads\/2007\/12\/shortcut_properties.gif' alt='Shortcut Properties &#038; Change Icon button' \/><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li>You may get a message like the following.  Just click &#8220;OK&#8221;\n<p><img src='https:\/\/www.visualfuture.com\/davetech\/wp-content\/uploads\/2007\/12\/iconwarning.gif' alt='Icon Warning Message' \/><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li>Now, pick an icon!  Usually Windows will direct you to the file %SystemRoot%\\system32\\SHELL32.dll which has many icons to choose from.  There are some additional (&amp; quite retro) icons in %SystemRoot%\\system32\\moricons.dll\n<\/li>\n<li>You can also design your own icons with a graphics program, or there are several websites with icons &amp; even some online icon creator sites.\n<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p>You&#8217;re all set!<\/p>\n<p>UPDATE: Here&#8217;s a link to Asa Dotzler&#8217;s blog where he covers how to create a <a href=\"http:\/\/weblogs.mozillazine.org\/asa\/archives\/2008\/08\/shortcut_to_lau.html\">shortcut to launch a specific firefox profile on mac<\/a>. Pretty simple to do using Apple Script. -Sally (the Mac user of this team)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Note: A link to instructions for Mac users is at the bottom of this post -s I started reading up on how to develop a FireFox Extension and one of the first recommendations is to create a separate FireFox profile. The second profile is recommended so you don&#8217;t have to clutter up your &#8220;regular&#8221; FireFox &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.visualfuture.com\/davetech\/2007\/12\/13\/creating-a-second-firefox-profile-for-seo\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Creating a second FireFox profile for SEO<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.visualfuture.com\/davetech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.visualfuture.com\/davetech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.visualfuture.com\/davetech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.visualfuture.com\/davetech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.visualfuture.com\/davetech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=64"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.visualfuture.com\/davetech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":109,"href":"https:\/\/www.visualfuture.com\/davetech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64\/revisions\/109"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.visualfuture.com\/davetech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=64"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.visualfuture.com\/davetech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=64"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.visualfuture.com\/davetech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=64"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}