398673 - runas.exe will not run Firefox as the user you expect when you have other Firefox instances open

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Toolkit :: Startup and Profile System, defect)

Description

[Martin Woodward]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-GB; rv:1.8.1.7) Gecko/20070914 Firefox/2.0.0.7
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-GB; rv:1.8.1.7) Gecko/20070914 Firefox/2.0.0.7

Firefox is nice and tries to only have one process.  An area where is should not is as follows.  You have Firefox running as a high privaledge user - however you want to run as a user with limited privaledges because you would like to visit a site that you are not sure about.  The windows command to run proceeses in the existint session with a different user credentials is "runas.exe".  If you type "runas /user:myLowAccessUsername firefox.exe" while an instance of firefox is running with the higher privaledges then you will get a new window come up that is actually running with the privaledges of the existing firefox process - however this fact is not obvious to the user doing "runas" and is not the expected result.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Run firefox.exe as an administrative user
2. With existing firefox.exe open - run firefox.exe as a low-privaledged user "runas /user:myUser firefox.exe"

Actual Results:  
Use process explorer to see that you have only one instance of the firefox.exe process and it is running with the initial (high) credentials.

Expected Results:  
There should be two processes, one for each of the crendentials used to start the firefox.exe command

The work-around is to close all existing firefox windows before opening the new one with different credentials - however it is easy to miss a window and be running as a different user than you expect.i

Comment 1

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

=> invalid
you must use -no-remote and a second profile to get a second instance of firefox to run.