329023 - can't start two instances of firefox from command line (Firefox already running message)

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 312154

(Toolkit :: Startup and Profile System, defect)

Description

[Eric]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; SunOS sun4u; en-US; rv:1.8) Gecko/20051130 Firefox/1.5
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; SunOS sun4u; en-US; rv:1.8) Gecko/20051130 Firefox/1.5

A single unix user can't start two instances of firefox from the command line, as could be done in Firefox 1.0.7.  The first instance starts fine:

user@machine$ /usr/local/firefox/firefox

Entering this command a second time as the same user on the same system will give no response until the first instance of Firefox is closed, at which point an error message (from the second instance) appears saying:

Firefox is already running, but is not responding. To open a new window, you must first close the existing Firefox process, or restart your system

A user _is_ able to start a second instance of Firefox if they start it with the -ProfileManager switch and choose a different profile.

A user can also open a second window (not instance) of Firefox if they go to the File menu and choose "New Window".  However, we have users displaying Firefox remotely via X11 back to multiple machines, so they have no way of knowing whoe else is using Firefox or where.

This worked fine in 1.0.7 and behaves as described in 1.5.  I have to revert some machines back to 1.0.7 as this behavior makes Firefox unusable.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Run "firefox" from a terminal.  It should open fine.
2. As the same user on the same machine, run "firefox" again from a terminal.  It should hang until the first Firefox window is closed, at which point it will display the error message described above.
Actual Results:  
Second "firefox" command hangs until first instance of Firefox is closed.

Expected Results:  
Second "firefox" command should bring up a new Firefox window.

Happens on Solaris 9 and 10.  I believe we saw this same behavior early on in the 1.0.x series, but don't quote me on that.  I know this problem does not happen with 1.0.7.  I am using the Solaris contrib builds from ftp.mozilla.org.

Comment 1

[Benjamin Smedberg]

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 312154 ***