Join the AMA (Ask Me Anything) with the Firefox leadership team to celebrate Firefox 20th anniversary and discuss Firefox’s future on Mozilla Connect. Mark your calendar on Thursday, November 14, 18:00 - 20:00 UTC!

This site will have limited functionality while we undergo maintenance to improve your experience. If an article doesn't solve your issue and you want to ask a question, we have our support community waiting to help you at @FirefoxSupport on Twitter and/r/firefox on Reddit.

Search Support

Avoid support scams. We will never ask you to call or text a phone number or share personal information. Please report suspicious activity using the “Report Abuse” option.

Learn More

Disable side by side feature of Firefox 67+

more options

My company uses an old ESR version of Firefox, which of course doesn't suit my needs. So I installed portable FF alongside this one, and uses it almost anytime (I know that I break the company policies...)

Up to FF 66, everything was fine, and I only had to launch Portable FF first to have it "taking the lead" and been used by default everywhere.

Firefox 67 has introduced the "side by side" feature, which is certainly nice and suits the huge majority of people. But not me... I now have both versions always running alongside, and Windows defaults to the old version, of course, since it is my company's setting.

Documentation for FF67 states "side by side mode is now enabled *by default*". Therefore, I have the obvious question: how can I disable this, since it is apparently the default, and not a mandatory setting.

I haven't found any clue to do that after many researches....

My company uses an old ESR version of Firefox, which of course doesn't suit my needs. So I installed portable FF alongside this one, and uses it almost anytime (I know that I break the company policies...) Up to FF 66, everything was fine, and I only had to launch Portable FF first to have it "taking the lead" and been used by default everywhere. Firefox 67 has introduced the "side by side" feature, which is certainly nice and suits the huge majority of people. But not me... I now have both versions always running alongside, and Windows defaults to the old version, of course, since it is my company's setting. Documentation for FF67 states "side by side mode is now enabled *by default*". Therefore, I have the obvious question: how can I disable this, since it is apparently the default, and not a mandatory setting. I haven't found any clue to do that after many researches....

Goldor0ck trɔe

All Replies (1)

more options

I'm not aware of a way to change how Firefox decides where to open external links (it always wants to use the default profile specified in the regular installation's files).

One workaround is to set Firefox Portable to be your default browser instead of Firefox. See: https://portableapps.com/node/60315