393645 - -new-tab command line parameter doesn't behave correctly or consistently in MacOSX.

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Toolkit :: Startup and Profile System, defect)

Description

[David Sowsy]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X; en-US; rv:1.8.1.6) Gecko/20070725 Firefox/2.0.0.6
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X; en-US; rv:1.8.1.6) Gecko/20070725 Firefox/2.0.0.6

In the Windows and Linux version of firefox if I specify: 

firefox -new-tab http://www.mozilla.org

and the firefox is already running, it opens up a new tab in the currently running firefox instance. 

I expect the same behavior to work in MacOSX. 


Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.Launch Firefox in MacOSX
2.Open a Terminal and cd into the Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS folder. 
3.Type './firefox-bin -new-tab http://www.mozilla.org'
Actual Results:  
A window opens up claiming "Close Firefox\n A copy of Firefox is already open. Only one copy of Firefox can be open at a time."

Expected Results:  
A new tab with the url I passed in as a parameter to -new-tab should be displayed in the currently running FireFox instance. 

A new tab with the url I passed in as a parameter to -new-tab should be displayed in the currently running FireFox instance.

Comment 1

[Sandip Chitale]

I can confirm this. This is a major issue for me. I am developing an add-on (aka extension) for FireFox. My add-on processes the command line args. I want to be able to invoke the add-on whether or not a previous instance of FF is running or not.

Can anyone suggest an alternate mechanism or workaround.

Comment 2

[Tarlika Elisabeth Schmitz]

I run Firefox 2.0.0.13 on Linux. Maybe I am making an incorrect assumption but I would have thought that the Linux and MacOSX versions of Firefox behave in the same way.

If this is the case upgrading to 2.0.0.13 would solve your problem: on Linux,
firefox -new-tab <url>
launches the URL in the firefox process that was started first (if you have multiple Firefox processes running).

Comment 3

[Chris Long]

This bug is also reproducible always in 3.03 on OS X 10.5. Full version:

Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.5; en-US; rv:1.9.0.3) Gecko/2008092414 Firefox/3.0.3

I would also appreciate a workaround if anyone knows one.

Comment 4

[Magnus Alström]

This bug is also reproducible always in Firefox 3.6 on MacOSX 10.6.2. Works perfect on Windows or Linux:

> firefox -new-tab http://www.mozilla.com

Anyone forgot to add this parameter for MacOSX?

Comment 5

[Maxi Combina]

This still is not solved. I am using Firefox 3.6.3 under Mac OS X 10.5.8.
I expect Firefox to display the requested URL in the current instance (if there is one) or in a new one (if there was none), such as it does under Linux and Windows.
Using Mac's open(1) is not useful to me, it does not get along well with TabMixPlus.

Comment 6

[Tarlika Elisabeth Schmitz]

I submitted a patch for this problem: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=427206.

I have been patching every Firefox version for myself since and it works fine.

Comment 7

[Smokey Ardisson (offline for a while; not following bugs - do not email)]

This can't be a regression from (and thereby block) bug 363747, since this bug was filed against Firefox 2:

(In reply to comment #0)
> User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X; en-US; rv:1.8.1.6)
> Gecko/20070725 Firefox/2.0.0.6

Bug 363747 landed for Firefox 3.6.

Comment 8

[David Rees]

This also keeps Thunderbird OSX users from using the "-compose" argument and also keeps the Thunderbird extension Thunderlink from working on OSX (it uses a -thunderlink argument that works fine on Linux and Windows).

Comment 9

[Ivan Enderlin]

This bug is still actual. Very annoying. Could someone fix that :-) ?

Comment 10

[Benjamin Smedberg]

Mac does not use a command-line remoting mechanism. Talking to an existing instance of Firefox is handled through apple events. This will not be fixed.

Comment 11

[Ivan Enderlin]

And how do we do that?

Comment 12

[Ivan Enderlin]

Maybe a solution with this AppleScript: http://git.mnt.io/?p=Dotfiles.git;a=blob;f=scripts/FirefoxNewWindow;hb=HEAD (change `keystroke "n"…` to `keystroke "t"…` for new tab).
And here is how to execute this script: http://git.mnt.io/?p=Dotfiles.git;a=blob;f=function;hb=HEAD.

Hope it helps.
I didn't found any documentation on MDN about that. Is it planned?