Running Mozilla Without Trashing Netscape Installation

This document explains how to run mozilla.exe separately from netscape.exe without trashing your regular installation of Netscape Communicator. This is necessary if, for example, you want to use Communicator's mail client while you work on Mozilla development.

  1. Before running mozilla.exe, create a new user profile either from a Netscape 4.0x installation using the "User Profile Manager" shortcut in the Utilities folder (on Windows) or by using  the -new_account option on the command line of either netscape.exe or mozilla.exe.  We suggest calling the profile "mozilla."
  2. Always use that new account when running mozilla.exe, and never run netscape.exe using that same account profile.
To make things easier, you can start the application with the user account on the command line, for example: This assures that prefs and the cache will not interfere between the two versions. This will be especially
important as new prefs are added to the Mozilla product. Note that you must use quotes around the name and there can be no space between the "P" and the profile name. Otherwise, the application won't catch the profile switch, and it will try to load the profile name as the initial URL.



You can copy your bookmark.htm file from an existing profile to your new profile directory if you want to share bookmarks.

After the initial 3/31 release, we will add some code to Mozilla to prevent running with a profile that is already being used by netscape.exe.
 



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