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

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

Answer 2

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 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.

Answer 10

Not Internet Explorer but it can be done with some major open source browsers.

Firefox

1. In Firefox its pretty easy to do. Right Click on Firefox's icon and go to properties.
2. At last of the target add -P Firefox --no-remote and apply the settings.
3. Each time you start Firefox (by clicking the shortcut you modified) you will be prompt for using profile.

I have screencasted a video on this topic, see it on YouTube

Google Chrome

1. Copy the current chrome.exe's target by going to Chrome's Properties.
2. Make a new shortcut and paste that copied target, make sure it is in double quotes, at last of target add --chrome-data-dir=C:\Chrome2 press next and name that shortcut e.g. Another Chrome.
3. There will be a folder named Chrome2 created in C: partition holding your another profile :)

Opera

It is also possible using opera, try using following steps:

1. Copy the current opera.exe's target by going to Opera's Properties.
2. Make a new shortcut and paste that copied target, make sure it is in double quotes, at last of target add opera.exe -pd C:\opera2 press next and name that shortcut e.g. Opera 2.
3. There will be a folder named opera2 created in C: partition holding your another profile :)

Alternatively, if you are using browser other than mentioned above you can use Private browsing (also known as InPrivate Browsing in IE and Incognito Window in Google Chrome) which are quite popular on mainstream browsers, but it is recommended to specify a dedicated directory so that you don't lose your data after you quit the browser (when using private mode you lose your data when you quit the session)

Additional Tips

If you are on operating system other than windows then you can start another instances of same browser. Just go in the terminal (you probably know how to do that), type in the browser's executive location followed by name. An example is path/to/file --chrome-data-dir=C:/Chrome2, same can be achieved with opera.

^{Some text taken from this question.}