How to maintain different active sessions in single firefox and internet explorer?

Question

Suppose we are working in Firefox. Now I have opened 3 tabs. In all 3 tabs I need to work on an application e.g. gmail account. i.e. Tab 1 has Account 1, tab 2 has account2 and tab 3 has account 3. I need to do this simultaneously. Please suggest method or add-on to do this task. I also need to do the same in Internet Explorer as well.

Answer 1

firefox -p brings up a profile manager. you can use it to create multiple profiles. by running "firefox -p profilename -no-remote" you can open multiple profiles at once! therefore you can have as many logged in users in any site. don't know about internet explorer...

Answer 2

The Multifox Firefox plugin may work for you: br.mozdev.org/multifox

Answer 3

I've never used it, but the GMail Manager addon for Firefox may help you to do this. Not sure about IE though.

EDIT: This obviously only helps if the application in question is GMail though!

Answer 4

Internet Explorer 8's "Private Browsing mode" gives you a totally independent session with no shared cookies or other login details. That gets you two sessions (albeit in two different windows, rather than tabs) out of the box.

You can't do the same thing in Firefox as Firefox 3.5's "Private Browsing" mode is more of a toggle, it closes and saves your main session first.

If you have more than one user account set up on your machine you could do a Run As on Firefox to open a second (third, etc) window up as a brand new Windows user, this would get you totally independent windows with independent sessions, but again in different windows.

Answer 5

Try this: http://www.xenocode.com/browsers/

Or VMWare's ThinApp.

Both will give you a virtual environment for the browser (a thin one, not a resource hog).

Answer 6

I do something "cheap" in Firefox - I have two GMail accounts and I keep one in a Firefox tab and a second in a Firefox tab using IETab.

But it doesn't help with three accounts obviously.

Answer 7

Turning a website into an application using a Site-Specific Browser might do the trick. For Firefox, see Prism. For a Mac, see Fluid. And Chrome has a built-in option "Create application shortcut".

Answer 8

Your best bet is to use Prism and create a separate 'web app for each instance (login).

Answer 9

Easiest way to do that in Internet Explorer is to do the following:

File > New Session

Then you get a new browser session, which will not use the same session as the one logged into gmail.

For Firefox use the private Browsing as others have suggested.