Firesquirrel is a version / profile manager for Firefox (Linux only). It can easily download a specific version of Firefox, extract it and create profiles using it. You can use multiple Firefox profiles using many Firefox versions at the same time. They run in a semi-portable mode, the binaries and their profiles are isolated, but $HOME is not, so it still uses your real ~/.cache, ~/.config, ~/.local etc to allow it to work properly with iBus, GVFS and other tools.

When you run it, it creates a data folder in the current directory, the data structure looks like this:

• data
  • binaries
    • (folders with Firefox binaries extracted from the tarballs)
  • mods
    • (mod scripts)
  • packages
    • (tarballs downloaded from Mozilla's servers)
  • profiles
    • (folders with all your Firefox profiles)
  • tmp
    • (temporary files used when downloading / extracting data)

It is NOT safe to run multiple downloads or creating multiple profiles at the same time, you may encounter conflicts in the tmp directory (too lazy to fix it now). But it is safe to run multiple profiles, even using multiple Firefox versions at the same time.

It is possible to make Firesquirrel run your own scripts everytime a specific action takes place, so you can customize your profiles, eg. inject configuration via the user.js file or the chrome directory. Mod scripts have access to Firesquirrel's DIR_* variables.

• postExtractBinary - runs after extracting a Firefox tarball, parameters:
  • version of the extracted Firefox binary
  • file nam of the extracted package
• postNewProfile - runs after creating a new profile, parameters:
  • version of the used Firefox binary
  • profile name

data/mods/postExtractBinary.sh:

#!/bin/bash
VERSION=$1
PACKAGE_NAME=$2

cd "$DIR_BINARIES/$VERSION"

echo "Removing [email protected]..."
rm "browser/features/[email protected]"

data/mods/postNewProfile.sh:

#!/bin/bash
VERSION=$1
PROFILE_NAME=$2

cd "$DIR_PROFILES/$PROFILE_NAME"

echo "Linking user.js and the chrome directory..."
ln -s "$HOME/.mozilla/custom/chrome" chrome
ln -s "$HOME/.mozilla/custom/user.js" user.js