296378 - Firefox started on remote machine via SSH starts local Firefox

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Toolkit :: Startup and Profile System, defect)

Description

[C Rose]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041107 Firefox/1.0
Build Identifier: Firefox 1.0 and 1.0.4

If I am running a local version of Firefox on localhost and I login to a
remotehost via SSH (using -X) and start an instance of Firefox on the remotehost
(expecting to get the remote Firefox show up on localhost via X forwarding) I
instead get another Firefox window from the Firefox running on the localhost.

This happens with Firefox 1.0 running on localhost and 1.0.4 running on
remotehost. I am using the following SSH version locally (OpenSSH_3.7.1p2, SSH
protocols 1.5/2.0, OpenSSL 0.9.7b 10 Apr 2003) and the following sshd on
remotehost (OpenSSH_3.5p1).

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Start Firefox on localhost.
2. SSH to remote host using "ssh -X [e-mail]"
3. Using the SSH connection, run the remote Firefox (e.g.
"/usr/local/bin/firefox/firefox").

Actual Results:  
A Firefox window opens on the localhost machine. The new Firefox window will
have the bookmarks, history etc. of the local Firefox. If you choose File->Open
File... you will see the directory structure for localhost.

Expected Results:  
I would have expected to see the remote Firefox running (e.g. the bookmarks and
file system for the remotehost).

This bug seems to be the opposite of Bug 292237 (and may be caused by exactly
the same problem).

It also seems that this behavior is possible by design. For example, there might
have been a design decision to reduce Internet traffic by forcing a local copy
of Firefox to run (I'm assuming that remote X sessions would require much more
bandwidth than simply getting pages locally). If this is so, then I think there
should be some kind of preference to specify which behaviour is desired.

I'm not sure, but are there security implications?

Comment 1

[Benjamin Smedberg]

This is caused by our "x-remote" implementation, which uses X window properties
to make sure that if you launch a second local copy of Firefox, it automatically
finds the running copy and uses that one (because we cannot share profile data
such as bookmarks between two running instances). You may set the
MOZ_NO_REMOTE=1 environment variable to skip the xremote check for a running
instance.