246027 - -remote "ping()" always reports no running window found

Status: VERIFIED DUPLICATE of bug 246166

(Toolkit :: Startup and Profile System, defect)

Description

[Gian Jaskulski]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7) Gecko/20040608 Firefox/0.8.0+
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7) Gecko/20040608 Firefox/0.8.0+

When I try run firefox -remote "ping()", it's allways reports "Error: No running
window found".

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1.
2.
3.

Comment 1

[Patrick Ryan]

I confirm this bug for 0.9RC.

Not only does ping() not work, but it appears that running browser detection is
broken in general.  openURL() doesn't work either, for example.

Comment 2

[Jason Tackaberry]

Also confirming for 0.9 RC on Linux (Fedora Core 2).  This absolutely must get
fixed for the final release, or else firefox will be useless as a URL handler in
GNOME (or KDE).

Comment 3

[Christopher DeMarco]

Confirmed on RH9.  Whose throat do we choke [wheels grease] to get this fixed
before 1.0?  This is huge!!

Comment 4

[Mike Connor [:mconnor]]

hrm, I'm not 100% sure on this, but I should point out that ping() syntax did
change (to be -a firefox ping() iirc)

Comment 5

[Gian Jaskulski]

Results of "firefox --help":
-remote <command>       Execute <command> in an already running Mozilla process.

I didn't see nothing about -a ;)

Comment 6

[Ivan Stojmirov]

I have just tried 0.9-final on Debian and this bug seems to crawl here also. It
is realy too bad that you let this huge thing slip in the final release. 
This makes my Gnome desktop uninteractive with FireFox. I will have to switch
back to 0.8 or something. :-(


./firefox -remote "ping()"
Error: No running window found

./firefox -remote "OpenURL(http://www.slashdot.org)"
Error: No running window found

Comment 7

[Gian Jaskulski]

I tried on 0.9 final (with slackware 9.1 and current, conectiva 9.0 and FC1) and
got same problem. I think with a bug of this kind, final (0.9) can't be released.

Comment 8

[Patrick Ryan]

fourwood and mconnor have pointed out that that the "-a firefox -remote
'ping()'" sequence will work.

I have confirmed that it does in fact work for me.

Here is my modified script to put a page in a new tab on an existing browser.

#!/bin/sh

cd /usr/local/firefox
((./firefox -a firefox -remote "ping()" &&
 ./firefox -a firefox -remote "openURL($@,new-tab)") ||
./firefox $@ ) &> /dev/null &

Comment 9

[Mike Connor [:mconnor]]

see the last comments in bug 246166

--help is out of date and inaccurate (i.e. it lists -splash, which segfaults :)

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 246166 ***

Comment 10

[Gian Jaskulski]

Need to update firefox --help then.