[TriLUG] Firefox behavior

[Kevin Hunter]

At 4:37am -0400 on Fri, 09 Oct 2009 Scott Hall wrote:
> Question for FireFox users on Ubuntu: are you having a problem keeping
> the process alive?

Yes, but it's one of those "paper cuts" with which I've learned to live 
and for which to prepare.  Obviously, I've set FF to load my windows and 
tabs from last time.  Then, when it does crash, at least I can get back 
to where I was.  Not perfect, but better than nothing.  See below ...

> I tend to open multiple windows (usually 5 or 6) each with from 10 to
> 30 tabs open.

Right there with you.  I've gotten to the point that I actually keep my 
projects separated into multiple profiles.  This lets me keep myself 
somewhat organized and focused on the project at hand, and also keeps 
the Awesome Bar more on target with that which I'm working and need at 
any given moment.

To this end, I got chastised in #trilug for not using certain extensions 
to help manage tabs, but having now tried some of those extensions, they 
still don't truly keep my separate activities ... separate.  As an 
example, reference the Awesome Bar separation; or a separate list of 
bookmarks; or separate download areas for different projects; or 
separate connection settings ...  For as many tabs and different 
contexts with which I work, making use of profiles was a major personal 
find.  (In this light, Jeff, you're response about "efficiency and 
convenience" is dead on.)

If you're interested, the trick is to modify whatever shortcut you use 
to start FF with two command line arguments:

$ firefox -no-remote -ProfileManager

-no-remote says to *not* just make a new window attached to a running 
instance, but instead start a new-one.

-ProfileManager starts the little profile selection box.

So, it still doesn't respond to the broken behavior of "just dying 
randomly" (I suspect largely due to a certain misbehaving Adobe product, 
usually from advertisements), but it does mitigate the issue and speed 
up recovery time.

Cheers,

Kevin

P.S. For reference, I currently have 25 different profiles, about 15 of 
which I actively use in a month.