The Problem I use Firefox for my regular browsing, but when developing in Visual Studio, I like the fact that when IE is the default browser Visual Studio will start it up for me, and and also stop debugging when the IE session is closed down. If I debug in Firefox, I need to tell visual studio to stop debugging. Because Firefox is usually still running also, it still maintains a session state on the server, so I need to close down all instances of firefox (which messes up my other browsing). I've recently found some solutions. 1. I can set Visual Studio 2005 to debug with a different browser from the system default. It's so simple, but I never new it was there. Open or create any ASP.NET project. In the File Menu, click Browse With..., pick your desired browser (in this case IE) and click Set as Default. Now visual studio will ignore the system default and use what you've set here. 2. I've also found that I can run 2 Firefox sessions separately from each other. This means that I have one running all the time (with the useful MinimizeToTray extension) for my google apps (gmail, calendar etc), and I have another one running as my regular web browser. They can have different security settings / cookie policies / addons / cache etc.... The way to do it is with "Profiles". With firefox not running, run

firefox.exe -profilemanager

and create a new profile (e.g. Google). Now create a batch file (e.g. googlebrowser.bat) with the following text in it.

set MOZ_NO_REMOTE=1 start "" "C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe" -p "Google" set MOZ_NO_REMOTE=0

where Google is the name of the profile. Create a shortcut to that batch file, and run it. Your standard firefox icon runs standard firefox, and the new shortcut runs the custom profile. I've set the homepages in my google profile to Gmail, Google Calendar, and Google reader (multiple tabbed homepages), and I've effectively got a "Google Browser." [tags]firefox, google, ie, visual studio[/tags]