244774 - Firefox won't run if Thunderbird already running because Firefox's ping() returns success

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Toolkit :: Startup and Profile System, defect)

Description

[Alex Cruise]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.6) Gecko/20040515 Firefox/0.8
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.6) Gecko/20040515 Firefox/0.8

The default 'firefox' shell script used to start firefox calls firefox-bin with
the "ping()" function to determine whether an instance is already running. 
Unfortunately, this function returns success if Thunderbird is running, and the
shell script erroneously asks Thunderbird to open browser windows.  Thunderbird
responds by popping up an Alert that says something to the effect that it can't
find navigator.xul.

I changed my version of the shell script to do this instead, but it'd be better
to fix ping().

pid=`/sbin/pidof firefox-bin`
if [ -z "$pid" ]; then
        RUNNING=1
else
        RUNNING=0
fi;



Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1. Run Thunderbird on Linux.
2. Attempt to run Firefox using the included 'firefox' shell script.
Actual Results:  
Thunderbird complains about being unable to find navigator.xul, because the
shell script is sending remote browsing commands to Thunderbird instead of
starting a new Firefox.

Expected Results:  
A new Firefox instance should be run.

Comment 1

[Steven Op de beeck]

I'm having this problem too.

* Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.6) Gecko/20040515 Firefox/0.8
* Thunderbird version 0.6 (20040502)

btw, it's the same when starting mozilla 1.6 when thunderbird is running.

Vice versa, starting thunderbird when firefox is running, is not a problem.

Comment 2

[Frederic Bezies]

Confirming with today's aviary firefox & thunderbird homemade builds, under
linux mdk 10.0 community.

Comment 3

[Ali Ebrahim]

I wonder if this regression was caused by the checkin for bug 177996.

Comment 4

[Alex Cruise]

One alternative would be to have Thunderbird deal with --remote http:// in the
same way it handles users clicking URLs in email messages, but it would be a
workaround at best.

Comment 5

[Mike Connor [:mconnor]]

ben backed out the startup script change from bug 177996, which caused this.