433717 - Impossible to use multiple profiles at the same time

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Toolkit :: Startup and Profile System, defect)

Description

[John Vivirito]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9b5) Gecko/2008050509 Firefox/3.0b5
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9b5) Gecko/2008050509 Firefox/3.0b5

When I run firefox for the first time, I see the profile manager window and I can choose a profile. If I then run 'firefox -P different-profile-name', I get a new browser window that uses the same profile. If I run 'firefox -ProfileManager', I also a new browser window instead of the profile manager.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.run firefox for first time
2.choose a profile
3.than run "firefox -P name of different profile"
Actual Results:  
both Firefox processes are using same profile even after naming a different profile 

Expected Results:  
both firefox windows open should use different profiles

If I run 'firefox -ProfileManager', I also a new browser window instead of the profile manager.
firefox -a anything' pops up a profile dialog. The -a option is not documented by 'firefox -h', nor by 'man firefox', but you can discover it by reading the /usr/bin/firefox shell script.

Comment 1

[Jo Hermans]

By default, you can only start 1 copy per screen (the second one never started, but opened a window in the first copy).

See <http://www.hiveminds.co.uk/node/3114> for a workaround (it's about Windows, but it's the same environment variable in Linux). You can also use the -no_remote commandline flag

Comment 2

[John Vivirito]

This is confirmed on Firefox-2.0 i reported it here for the reporter of the launchpad bug, I asked the reporter and other people seeing this from LP bug to add info to this bug report.

Comment 3

[John Vivirito]

Does this mean its a bug or a feature and is there any changes to be made by mozilla to "fix"?

Comment 4

[Benjamin Smedberg]

This is a dup of a WONTFIXed bug.

Comment 5

[John Vivirito]

Can you pleae provide a bug number so i can read up on it.

Comment 6

[John Vivirito]

Marked as wont fix due to prior bug report on same issue. 

Comment 7

[komputes]

I was going to follow up on this bug but after further testing I no longer see this issue as a bug. Let's say you have 3 profiles: profile1, profile2 and profile3. Simply run these commands to run each profile in a separate window:
firefox -no-remote -P profile1
firefox -no-remote -P profile2
firefox -no-remote -P profile3

Comment 8

[komputes]

firefox -no-remote -ProfileManager

This works just as well,if you want a graphical interface to pick the profile from). You can create a link to firefox using that command and every time you open from that link it will ask you which profile you would like to use.