Darned plugins – How to run a separate copy of Firefox

I recently created a wordpress website, www.leylandlandscapes.co.uk, and I tried free hosting.

This was the first free host trying to find a free host, and it is fraught with obstacles. The third one I tried, host-ed, was the first that actually worked. Of course I wanted everything, but the resources provided were suitable: a MySql database, PHP, a decent amount of web space. I can now understand why free hosting isn’t as free as you think.

Where are my pictures?
My biggest problem was that the pictures were missing.

My first measure of how good an online service is, is the response when you ask them a question. Do they answer? When do they answer? Does it help? They did, and it did.

The problem turned out to be my slightly paranoid firefox plugins. I have Adblock, and Noscript. Plus the Dansguardian content filtering at home. I needed a simple way to run firefox briefly without the plugins. My answer, being a linux user, was create another user, and run firefox under that account.

These are my steps for running a pristine firefox
I have seen other ways of running firefox with new profiles. But this seems cleaner to me, keeping everything separated as a new user. YMMV.

• Create a new user (try using useradd), say chewy. root user needs to do this.
• run the command
  

  xhost +local:

  This will allow any local user to use your X display.

• Log in as new user. E.g.
  

  login chewy

• Make sure firefox knows where the X display is, and run firefox.
  

  export DISPLAY=:0.0
  firefox