You mean like Firefox -P -no-remote ? http://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/Managing-profiles I can understand that end-users with little computer knowledge think it doesn't exist, but you are posting on Slashdot and are supposedly an advanced user that can check his facts, that was the first hit on google for "Firefox profile management". This feature exists since... forever (Mozilla Suite even had it), I have 2 versions of Firefox running happilly at the same time with separate profiles. How do you think that web developpers check their pages in different versions of Firefox ?

Then again, the French government is the only one, outside of a George Orwell novel, that has an agency dedicated to "language purity".

Another urban legend :) Many countries have such an agency, for instance in Spain they have the Real Academia Espanola (equivalent to the French Académie française) and they also have the Instituto Cervantes (equivalent to French Alliance Française).

The purpose of these agencies is mostly to make sure that the written language does not differ too much from a country to another one while the spoken French can be very different (I have difficulties understanding people from some regions of Québec or West-Africa for instance, but we write the exact same language unlike Brits and Americans who have languages clearly diverging).

German is another example of a language with an even stronger "official" version, they had a huge language reform in the 80s/90s that went way beyond what the Académie Française ever did and which purpose was to normalize written German.

See the Wikipedia list of languages with a regulation body, which is a looooon list : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_language_regu lators