1304402 - multiple (two or more) Main Windows open when clicking quickly clicking Thunderbird start icon or thunderbird.exe

Status: NEW

(Thunderbird :: Mail Window Front End, defect)

Description

[Marc Auslander]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:49.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/49.0
Build ID: 20160916101415

Steps to reproduce:

With Thunderbird not running, click on a desktop icon four times in quick succession.


Actual results:

Two instances of Thunderbird launch.  Of course, confusion follows if this is not noticed.


Expected results:

Only one instance should launch.  Of course, once Thunderbird is running, an attempt to launch again from the desktop icon just opens the running version.  So it appears there is a race in the detection of a running instance early in startup.

Comment 1

[Marc Auslander]

Note that it also possible to open two instances by double clicking on a taskbar pinned icon, although less reliably.  I suspect this is in fact how my wife has being doing it :-)  And it's a much more likely failure mode than four clicks on the desktop icon - many users are unsure when one click will to it and when two are required in the windows UI.

Comment 2

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

I can easily reproduce from the taskbar icon or from windows explorer thunderbird.exe. For the later, it helps a bit to have mouse click set to immediately execute/open the file.  I don't find any duplicates amongst Thunderbird bug reports https://mzl.la/2diDW2d  - howeve there may be dupes in https://mzl.la/2diHl18

I would say, I've tried such things in past years and wasn't easy to reproduce. But perhaps not it's easier because I have an SSD disk.
xref bug 1232154, and the cast of past bug reports  https://mzl.la/2diDW2d

Comment 3

[u38342]

It annoys me also.   I'm using Windows 10 Insider Preview.  Currently Build 16215, but since a long time ago, this problem has persisted.

Comment 4

[u38342]

For reference, I had installed addons, Enigmail and MinimizeToTray revived.  Are they harmful?

Comment 5

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Attachment: TB 110.0a1 2022-12-22 running twice against same profile directory.png

(In reply to Wayne Mery (:wsmwk) from comment #2)

I can easily reproduce from the taskbar icon or from windows explorer
thunderbird.exe. For the later, it helps a bit to have mouse click set to
immediately execute/open the file. I don't find any duplicates amongst
Thunderbird bug reports https://mzl.la/2diDW2d - howeve there may be dupes
in https://mzl.la/2diHl18

I have seen this a few more times over the years. Most recently today with nightly build 110.