462311 - Firefox incorrectly detects another running instance

Status: VERIFIED INVALID

(Firefox :: General, defect)

Description

[Matěj Cepl]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; cs-CZ; rv:1.9.0.2) Gecko/2008102718 Fedora/3.0.2-1.fc10 Firefox/3.0.2
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; cs-CZ; rv:1.9.0.2) Gecko/2008102718 Fedora/3.0.2-1.fc10 Firefox/3.0.2

(originally reported as https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=449188)

Firefox won't start due to a claim that it's already running. It brings up a
dialog box, saying:

Firefox is already running, but is not responding. To open a new window, you
must first close the existing Firefox process, or restart your system.

The only problem is that there isn't an existing firefox process on that box.
However, there is a running firefox on another box, and my home directory is NFS
mounted, and hence shared between the two. I can't believe this behaviour is
intentional. After all, it's been possible to run two instances of a browser on
multiple boxen pretty much since the dawn of the web. It's quite a regression
that we're unable to do so now...

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. NFS mount your home directory on two boxen
2. Start firefox on the first box
3. Attempt to start firefox on the second box
Actual Results:  
It is not possible to run two instance of FF in the given configuration

Expected Results:  
It should be

From the further discussion on the Fedora bugzilla:
Comment #1 From  Martin Stransky 2008-10-29 05:53:52 EDT

If you want to run two independent instances of the browser in the same home,
create a different profile for each box. It's not a bug, it's intentional
because of the session management.

Comment #2 From  Tethys  2008-10-30 04:58:08 EDT

Wrong. Maybe Firefox has made such braindead design decisions. But the bug
still stands. Firefox *is* still incorrectly detecting another running
instance, and neither of the proposed actions in the error message will
work. At the very least, the error message needs fixing.

Comment 1

[Nick Thomas [:nthomas] (UTC+12)]

Firefox won't let you run two instances with the same profile on a single machine, presumably because of the additional complexity in implementation and the limited use-case. How is is different if you're trying to run on separate machines with common storage ? The issue is multiple instances stomping on each others changes in the profile.

Comment 2

[Matthias Versen [:Matti]]

Running 2 instances (doesn't matter if on the same or different systems) with one single profile would corrupt the profile because 2 independent processes would write at the same time to the same profile.

The error message is triggered by a profile.lock file in the profile directory.
The error message could be fixed but running 2 Firefox.exe processes on 2 different systems with the same profile is an edge case.

Comment 4

[Matthias Versen [:Matti]]

no, this is no dupe, this is just invalid because it's unsupported to run 2 firefox processes with one Profile at the same time

Comment 5

[Tyler Downer [He/Him]]

OK, makes sense.