945554 - Ability to run desktop and Metro Firefox simultaneously in different profiles

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Firefox for Metro Graveyard :: General, enhancement)

Description

[Matt Brubeck (:mbrubeck)]

For development purposes, and for other use cases, it would be useful to run Metro Firefox and desktop Firefox separately by using different profiles.  For development especially, I need a way to restart Metro Firefox while keeping a desktop Firefox window open.

I can't find a good way to do that currently; if any desktop Firefox process is running, no matter what profile it uses, clicking on a Metro Firefox tile will open a new window in that desktop process rather than launch the Metro UI.

That's fine as a default behavior, but I'd like a way to override it, perhaps by adding a command-line option that could be used along with -no-remote and -profile to start the Metro app.

Possibly related: bug 945511.

Comment 1

[Matt Brubeck (:mbrubeck)]

This is working better for me now.  I can start up a desktop browser with my "desktop" profile by running "firefox.exe -P desktop -no-remote", and while it is running I can launch a second Firefox using my main profile ("firefox.exe -P default -no-remote").  That process will always start on desktop if an existing process is running on desktop (I think this is a bug in CEH) but I can then switch it to Metro using the relaunch button.

Comment 2

[Brian R. Bondy [:bbondy]]

The CEH doesn't actually know anything about which profiles are running, it only knows about if an instance of firefox or an instance of metro firefox is running.

What we should do to fix this is have the browser create a global event w/ Win32 API CreateEvent (or mutex will work here too).  Then in the CEH we could try to create it and see if it already exists or not.  If it exists then the browser with that profile is running.

Comment 3

[Firefox Bug Husbandry Bot]

Mass close of bugs in obsolete product https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1350354