[CentOS] Can one invoke multiple INSTANCEs of Firefox on CentOS

[Barry Brimer]

Quoting "James B. Byrne" <byrnejb at 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