238992 - firefox -remote option doesn't work on MacOS X

Status: VERIFIED INVALID

(Firefox :: General, defect)

Description

[John Flynn]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.6) Gecko/20040206 FireFox/0.8
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.6) Gecko/20040206 FireFox/0.8

The -remote option doesn't work on MacOS X. The browser just tries to startup as
another instance, and displays the "choose profile" dialog. It works fine on Linux.

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
Try to run something like:

/Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/firefox -remote 'openURL(whatever)'


Actual Results:  
Another full instance of Firefox launches.

Expected Results:  
Should have followed the -remote directive just like the Linux version does.

I ran a "strings" and noticed that -remote wasn't present in the firefox-bin in
the MacOS X build, but IS present in the Linux build. Did this somehow get
#ifdef'ed out on MacOS?

Comment 1

[Mike Connor [:mconnor]]

I don't think xremote is enabled on OS X for anything from Mozilla

Comment 2

[Mike Connor [:mconnor]]

-remote is specific to Unix builds.  OS X handles processes and instances
differently than Linux, so remote is irrelevant.

-> INVALID, this functionality is not used on the platform in question.

Comment 3

[agittins]

MacOS X <u>is</u> a Un$x build! :-) 
 
I have the same problem on Firefox 1.0, MacOS X 10.3. 
 
If there is no way to launch a new browser tab/window from the command line 
while an existing session is open (I have not found one) then this should be 
fixed with something similar (preferably identical) to the -remote facility. If 
there is a way to launch new windows/tabs in the same session from the command 
line then this could be added to the FAQ or similar. 
 
Is it better to reopen this bug, or file a new one? Or am I missing something 
here that should be obvious? 

Comment 4

[Daniel Wang]

*** Bug 236658 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 5

[Benjamin Smedberg]

Use appleevents.