Browsing a single website with multiple logins

Ever wanted to browse a website with multiple logins simultaneously? Perhaps you have two Gmail accounts whose inboxes you’d like to monitor at the same time. Or maybe you want to surf several Facebook accounts without having to log off one before being able to sign in another.

Here’s a simple 2-step tutorial on how to use multiple accounts for a single website using the Firefox web browser.

Opening multiple Firefox browsers

When you’re using Firefox, or any other internet browser for that matter, it is executed from a single process no matter how many new windows you open. So if you’re logged into Gmail with joe@gmail.com and then you open a new Firefox window (Ctrl+N) pointed to Gmail.com, it will still display Joe’s inbox. You won’t be able to sign in to another Gmail without first signing out of Joe. That’s where multiple Firefox processes comes into play. However, we’re first going to take a look at Firefox profiles and how it will help solve our problem.

What is a Firefox profile?

Here is Firefox’s take on profiles:

Any changes you make while using Firefox are stored in files so that they can be used the next time you run Firefox. These changes can be obvious, like your home page, or changes you’ve made to the toolbar, but also include things like your history, what sites you’ve visited, and text you’ve entered into forms like search fields. They’re all stored in the same location, called a profile folder.

From what I have learned, each Firefox profile is executed from its own process. Therefore, the question now is: how do I open multiple Firefox profiles? I’ll answer this in 2 simple steps.

The 2-step method

1. Create a Firefox profile

To create a Firefox profile, you will need to run the profile manager. Close Firefox and click Start > Run. Type firefox.exe -p and open it up. By default, the profile you are currently using is called just that – default. Go ahead and create some new profiles. In this example, I have created two additional profiles called 1 and 2.

2. Open the profiles

When you first launch your Firefox browser, it will automatically load your default profile. To open your other profiles, again click Start > Run and type:

firefox.exe -p PROFILENAME -no-remote

Be sure to change PROFILENAME to whatever you named your profile. You can repeat this step again to open any other profiles you may have created. To continue on with my example, I executed both: firefox.exe -p 1 -no-remote and firefox.exe -p 2 -no-remote

The last thing I’d like to mention is that whichever profile you executed last will be the first to launch the next time you open Firefox.

Have fun browsing your multiple accounts!

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