Firefox and Google talk are two apps which I cannot really manage without...but then what do you do if you share your PC with someone else? Maybe someone else at home. Each of us have our own collection of bookmarks, addons and of course logins.
So you would need to get Firefox and Gtalk to run multiple instances. The secret to running them is to use Firefox's in built profile manager. We need to invoke the profile manager by changing the shortcut path on your desktop. Ideally, the target looks like this "C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe"
Change it to
"C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe" -profilemanager.
Run the shortcut and you will come across the profile manager.
[caption id="attachment_188" align="alignnone" width="300" caption="Firefox profile manager"]
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Click on create new to start the new profile wizard.
[caption id="attachment_189" align="alignnone" width="300" caption="add new profile firefox wizard"]
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But, even now, there firefox would not let you run two profiles at the same time. Which means if you open another firefox instance when one is running, it will still belong to the same profile. Now to work around that, we need to change the path to
"C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe" -no-remote -profilemanager
Run the shortcut and you will come across the profile manager even if you have one firefox instance running already. Great now you can login two people can login to two gmail accounts at the same time...
Now, Gtalk is not as customizable as Firefox is, but still they manage to give us two workarounds to run multiple instances.
1. Download
Google talk. Run it as instance no.1. Download
Gtalk labs edition, run it as instance no. 2
2. I do not recommend gtalk labs edition as it is still in limited beta and has quite a few shortcomings compared to the regular gtalk app. So we lets get to playing around with the shortcut target for google talk as well, considering you had a default install of gtalk, the shortcut target should be "C:\Program Files\Google\Google Talk\googletalk.exe". And yes, its a bit different if you run Vista. Lets change the shortcut to
"C:\Program Files\Google\Google Talk\googletalk.exe" /nomutex
Gtalks! galore, run as many as you want....
[caption id="attachment_190" align="alignnone" width="150" caption="Multiple Google talk instances"]
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