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I suggest to use Mozilla Firefox under Unix/Linux (and probably other systems) this way:

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Create several Firefox profiles. For example I have the following profiles:

default

Profile used for Web surfing. It has configured proxy, offline mode, ad blocking, etc. Here I also keep my Web bookmarks.

local

For reading HTML files locally, as well as for browsing http://localhost site. No proxy, no ad blocking, an other set of bookmarks, etc.

extdev

I use this profile for development of Fireofx extensions.

alien

With this profile I can see as other Firefox users would see my Web sites, as this profile is not tuned accordingly my personal tastes.

The problem is to run several Firefox instances simultaneously.

For example,

firefox -P default
firefox -P local

does not work. The second instance of Firefox is not started and local profile is not loaded, only default profile.

The solution is to start Firefox this way:

firefox -a default -P default
firefox -a local -P local

This way several distinct Firefox processes are started, tagged by ID given in the -a option argument. I suggest to give the -P and -a options the same argument. It can be accomplished with a simple shell function like this:

ff() {
(
profile="$1"
if [ -z "$profile" ]; then
firefox "$@"
else
shift
firefox -P "$profile" -a "$profile" "$@"
fi
)
}

Then I can start firefox by such command as

ff default http://b2e.portonvictor.org