[ale] X Multiple Screens, Firefox

[Robert Story]

On Sat, 6 Jan 2007 10:04:25 -0500 (GMT-05:00) Dow_Hurst wrote:
D> Actually the situation is a bit more complex:
D> 
D> If I ssh -X to another machine and try to open a remote Firefox instance to be displayed on my local machine, then that fails to happen if I have local Firefox running already on my local machine.  Isn't that weird?  I can kill the current local Firefox and repeat the remote command to start Firefox on the remote machine, then Firefox runs on the remote machine and displays properly on the local machine.  I never had this effect with the old Netscape or Mozilla.  Why is this happening?  The problems your having Michael seem very related to this issue too.

I ran into this too. If you look at the firefox startup script, you'll see
that it checks for a running copy before starting up. While I never looked
into getting a second firefox processing running for the same user/profile, I
did come up with this script to start a second firefox process with a
different process. I use this to start a new firefox that doesn't go through
my proxy, for the rare occasion when I need to see if my proxy is causing
problems with some site:

--- cut here ---
#/bin/bash
export MOZ_NO_REMOTE=1
case $1 in
 d*) PROFILE=~/.mozilla/firefox/3cna42os.dummy/ ;;
 *) PROFILE=~/.mozilla/firefox/4zbj8hxd.mine/ ;;
esac
/usr/bin/firefox -Profile $PROFILE &
--- cut here ---

I have it in ~/bin/ff, and run 'ff dummy' to get a second firefox process.  I'd
worry about using it with the same profile when another instance was running,
as it would probably not be good for two processes to both think they had
exclusive write access to the cache, bookmark files, etc...