213616 - Can't force selection of Profile when Mozila is already running.

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 43912

(Core Graveyard :: Cmd-line Features, defect)

Description

[Chris Schanck]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.5b) Gecko/20030723
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.5b) Gecko/20030723

Under Linux, when I invoke Mozilla I get the profile selection dialog (I have
multiple profiles). My guess is this won't be true when I update. But under
Windows, no matter what command line options I try I can't get moz to present me
with the profile dialog so i can have two seperate instances with two seperate
profiles running. This is important for me because I have access to multiple
http proxies at one location, some more appropriate for personal browsing than
others ;-)

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Create two seperate profiles
2. Start mozilla in one profile
3. attempt to start mozilla a second time


Actual Results:  
It always opens a new window in the same instance which is currently running.
Now, this is cool stuff that never used to work, but trying -SelectProfile
-ManageProfile -PrayForProfile etc. don't seem to matter.

Expected Results:  
There should be a command line option which forces moz to give you the ability
to select another profile and start a seperate instance using this. If it is
there, it doesn't conform to any of the docs about command line options I can find.

Again, the behavior with no command line switch is correct, and lovely. But
there must be a switch to get at a seperate profile from a dialog box? As it is
I can't get to my other profiles simultaneously (sp).

Comment 1

[Matthias Versen [:Matti]]

"set MOZ_NO_REMOTE=1" doesn't work ?

Comment 2

[Chris Schanck]

THANK YOU for that suggestion. It works, but under windows it is a PITA to have
to have the environment var set or unset on demand (per shortcut, as it were).
Is there is a -noremote command line switch?

One annoyance is that that windows build is of no use when using -help; I
believe there is a bug open about that.

Comment 3

[Chris Schanck]

Note that the end user docs claim that -SelectProfile does exactly this, but it
doesn't work for me (under XP, 15alpha)

Comment 4

[Matthias Versen [:Matti]]

i think this is a dupe of a wontfix bug.

get the help with "mozilla -help|more"  or
http://www.mversen.de/mozilla/commands.txt

"-SelectProfile" works only if no session is running. 
This is by design...

Comment 5

[Chris Schanck]

If it is designated a wontfix, that would suck because it essentially locks you
out of running more than one instance at a time with a nice GUI front end for
choosing which profile. Note that with the MOZ_NO_REMOTE hack works, so clearly
you CAN do this...

I use this functionality (multiple instances running at the same time) all the
time under Linux ...

Comment 6

[Matthias Versen [:Matti]]

dupe of a invalid (invalid = by design)

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 43912 ***