RayRay Is Forever

I took special interest in Mozilla Labs: Weave as it is similar to Foxmarks/Xmarks in giving you the ability to remotely synchronize securely your Firefox Bookmarks and Passwords, except integrated much more tightly with Firefox. Every browser has its strengths, and Firefox has a plethora of plugins that make the internet either more fun or more tedious… depending on how you look at it. Firefox stable is at 3.5.5 currently, however the Minefield nightly builds are on 3.7.1 and are a vision of the future to come. Minefield is the codename for upcoming, bleeding edge developer builds for Firefox, just as Webkit is a bleeding edge Safari. Unfortunately, unlike having Webkit and Safari installed at the same time, you can only run one Firefox at a time. Worse yet, when you run Minefield, most of your extensions are disabled as they are not tested to work with that high of a version.

Personally, I love having the ability to run both Webkit and Safari simultaneously. Webkit downloads daily updates, a small annoyance every day for having two browsers running in their own processes. Firefox feels slow once you start adding plug-ins and extensions into it. I believe Chrome has a great idea, running each tab and window in a separate process. Since Firefox of whichever versions runs as one process, it becomes sluggish even when on a multi-core Xeon there is plenty of free CPU and RAM. Sadly, not even the bookmark manager works in the Mac OSX Chrome dev builds yet.

The beauty of Weave is that as opposed to FBRE backups or Xmarks, it is a Mozilla created project and is compatible with bleeding edge versions of Firefox. That means that all of the same bookmarks and passwords are seamlessly synchronized between the two. With one account, no exporting/importing your files constantly.

On a side note, Xmarks promises to work with Safari, Chrome, Internet Explorer, and Firefox. I thought about synchronizing all of my bookmarks, but that is what my delicious account is for. In addition, there appear to be downsides to installing the Safari extension. Currently there are very few plugins available for Safari that will run in 64-bit mode. Safari and Webkit are amazing enough that I don’t mind not having ad blocking installed. Plus, I’m using Allbookmarks (free) to show me all of my bookmarks for every browser. The Firefox plugin does add some neat features, but it is bloated for this purpose.

Anyways, how to run Minefield and Firefox simultaneously on your Mac easily!

First, install the Mozilla Weave plugin and setup an account. Synchronize your bookmarks and passwords.

Use Finder or Spotlight and open up Terminal.app in /Applications/Utilities/

Paste this into Terminal and hit enter: /Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/firefox-bin  -Profilemanager

Create a second profile. I just called mine “Minefield” for simplicity. Profilemanager help page.

Once your second profile is created, start with your default so your regular Firefox.app will continue to use it. Retry the Terminal command if you are taken into the Minefield profile instead, as you will be able to just re-select the default again.

Download a Minefield nightly build

Mount the .dmg & drag to your Applications folder.

There are more than two ways of running Minefield with the new profile. You simply need to setup an easy way to pass command line arguments to its firefox-bin. Here is how to do it in Automator, although Script Editor from this  MacOSXHints page could be superior. Just depends on how much time you want to spend on it. I’ll assume if prefer Script Editor, I don’t need to explain anything to you

Use Finder and open Automator.app in /Applications/

Select new Workflow and simply select from the Library > Utilities > Run Shell Script

Here you can paste in /Applications/Minefield.app/Contents/MacOS/firefox-bin -P Minefield &

(Replace the Minefield after -P for Profile with whatever name you called the new Profile.) I should mention that I have my Terminal.app default settings set to close the shell if it exits cleanly. This is a simple preference in Terminal.app that will prevent a window from staying open after passing the arguments to Minefield.

Now all you have to do is save the Automator action as an Application into /Applications. You can even give it the Minefield icon. This is basically just a shortcut to run Minefield with a different profile without using the command line.

Install Mozilla Weave, synchronize, and enjoy having a Firefox with loads of speed and a Firefox with loads of features.