Separation of Web and App
I need to run Gmail and Google Calendar in a separate browser instance from my working browser so they are isolated from crashes/hangs. I tried the Firefox 3 Prism plugin along with gmail.webapp and gcalendar.webapp but wasn’t happy with this - mainly because I don’t want a separate instance for gmail and calendar. I want my browser and one other instance hosting both gmail and calendar.
You can run multiple Firefox instances by directly launching /Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/firefox
- but risk corrupting shared profile database files.
So I ended up creating a simple profile just for these webapps - launching the Profile Manager with
/Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/firefox -P -no-remote
and creating a new profile named google.
Now I can launch gmail and calendar using this new profile in a separate Firefox instance like this: /Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/firefox-bin -P google -no-remote https://mail.google.com/mail https://www.google.com/calendar/render
. I packaged this shell script in a bundle as Google.app and gave it the icon borrowed from Google Notifier.app
. You can download it here.
Also, if you prefer monospace fonts when viewing and composing plain text emails in Gmail, create a user CSS file in the google profile you created above (e.g. ~/Library/Application Support/Firefox/Profiles/*.google/chrome/userContent.css
) with the following contents:
@-moz-document domain(mail.google.com)
{
/* GMail messages and textarea should use fixed-width font */
.ArwC7c, .iE5Yyc {
font-family: MonoSpace !important;
font-size: 9pt !important;
}
}