Quoting "James B. Byrne" byrnejb@harte-lyne.ca:

I am doing some testing with XForms and I really need a separate instance of Firefox, one that shares nothing with my primary instance that has various reference works and web sites open, to test forms. Is this even possible? I have a sense from the small bit of testing that I have done that even with separate profiles and invoking the firefox process manually from different terminal windows does not provide a completely separate running instance on the desktop.

Is there a way to do this? If so then how?

Run them as different users with sudo.

1. Create a few extra linux user accounts 2. Give yourself sudo access to the other users 3. Run sudo -H -u <account name> firefox

Notes:

I do not give my browser accounts shells. If you are using acrobat reader plugin .. give the account a shell and open acroread once to accept the license, then you can change the shell back to /bin/false. Actually acrobat reader plugin does not work using this method.

I use this primarily for allowing myself to have browsers with different versions of java .. so there is no java plugin in /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins .. but in ~<account name>/.mozilla/plugins I place the link to the appropriate java plugin. You probably have to create the per-user plugins directory yourself.

You will need to grant the user accounts the ability to use the X server. Once you are logged in to Gnome/KDE open a shell and type "xhost local:" after login. There may be a way to have this persist, I've never looked into it.

If you want sound to work you will need to adjust permissions on /dev/dsp as needed.

Hope this helps.

Barry