Comment by Teichopsia | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Teichopsia | Hacker News Reader

TLDR; could someone point me to a tutorial or an explanation on how to properly install FF, update & save the open tabs without making bookmarks (that last point is and edge case we can skip if it's difficult), and having the current icon, on a nix system that has explanations for 5 year olds?

I would love to help but being an amateur I've encountered a few pain points, unless the issue is my search skills are lacking. A few days ago I finally updated my Firefox version on Debian 9 to the developer version 56 (previous 54). The problem has been finding documentation on both the Debian and Mozilla websites on how to do it the right way. Found a decent tutorial, made a back up, installed and my machine is working much better. It is old and got little memory :)

Then FF said there was an update. I got stumped. From what I could find FF sync has a limit of X bytes. I ended up looking into making a web extension but that's going to take me some time. It seems I could save the open tabs using Tabs.tab from the API, maybe. Sorry, I digress.

In short, how can I have two FF versions on at the same time, different directories obviously, with their respective icons, while manually updating them? I guess it would be to delete all the files in the dir, unpacking, and call it a day? Still need help with the two versions though.

If you read all of this, thank you.

I'm not sure exactly what you're asking, but try just using the same profile for both installs. It contains all the information about your browsing session including tabs, bookmarks, extensions, cookies, etc.

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-manager-create-...

His point is concurrent usage of one profile. FF does not support this.

Queue the FF is not tread safe jokes (and only that, not a flame).

OP: you can use Firefox Sync. There is a cloud version by Mozilla but also a WSGI app you could host. I know it is not a 100% solution, but what was recommended to me when I asked during FF alpha and beta testing with stable way back when.

Sorry if I explained myself incorrectly. My main point isn't concurrent usage of profiles.

I lack the necesary knowledge on how to correctly install two different FF versions and have them accesible with their respective icons. In my case, FF dev version and the one discussed in the article to help out with bug testing/development.

The issue is since I'm on Debian, auto update does not work. From my limited understanding, I would need to install FF 57 in its own directory. For this one I don't need a profile. But I don't know how to install it and have it accesible either by command line or the FF icon that comes with the browser since I already have my main FF I want to keep.

The second part is regarding the profile, sync with the other browser I recently installed.... I was about to go down a mental rabbit hole :)

The problem is, the lack of noob friendly documentation. I know I could figure it out if I research the issue through different topics on Linux administration. I was hoping that maybe someone knew of a tutorial which talked about the different steps on how to install Firefox on a nix system, explaining the different concepts as if I were a five year old. The best I've managed to find is a tutorial laying out the steps. But it didn't explain the concepts behind those steps.

That tutorial mentioned how to replace debians FF from the repo. But whenever a new version comes out I would need to delete it and unpack the new one, linking it to the old icon.

I hope it's clear now. Thanks for the reply.

I use Ubuntu, which should be pretty similar to Debian as far as this is concerned:

I literally just downloaded the zip file (or maybe a .deb?) and unzipped it in a directory in my desktop. All I had to do after that was make sure I didn't have both browsers open, and everything worked properly. They both used the same profile, and the tabs I opened in nightly were available in stable and vice versa.

I did nothing more than unzip the browser, and everything works perfectly.

I'll give that a try. How did you link the icon? Or was that automatic too?

Maybe this is what you're looking for? (I just installed Nightly on my Ubuntu 17.10 install and wanted separate icons myself).

https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/6tt7wj/nightly_cre...

Seems to be about right. Thanks!

I didn't link the icon, I just ran the script (I use gnome-do and ran it from there).

Thanks. I'll read this in a bit. When I was looking into different options I did find a mention about the profile, but the doc/tutorial seemed to be old and couldn't find it in the dir when I looked for it.

> update & save the open tabs without making bookmarks

Not sure if you are looking something like this, but OneTab extension it's pretty useful to me. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/onetab/

Maybe. I'll have to take a deeper look into this. It seems I could upload the tab list and retrieve them later. Thanks.

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