705510 - Opening a new process of FF 8.0.x is not possible

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Firefox :: General, defect)

Description

[u266047]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:8.0.1) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/8.0.1
Build ID: 20111120135848

Steps to reproduce:

Hello,

Often after navigating around in the web I need to check my email or to do some banking. In such cases I need a new browser process with clean state. In the same time I don't want to close the existing browser process, as I have some state in it that I would need some time later. In such a case I have to open some other browser - IE or Chrome in order to be able to do my work.
Instead of that I would like to be able to start a new clean Firefox process, different than an existing Firefox process. That is available in IE 8.0 and above and I want it in Firefox as well. It is a strong competitive advantage, which Firefox lacks currently.
This feature was available up to Firefox 3.6.x and then it was removed. Please, provide it again.
Thank you.

Best regards,
Lyubomir


Actual results:

I have Firefox started. I click again on the Firefox short-cut. A new Firefox window is opened to the same Firefox process.


Expected results:

A new clean Firefox process should be started for the new window.

Comment 1

[Jo Hermans]

Firefox (or Netscape) has NEVER worked like this. It's used to quickly open a new window, because it "borrows" the existing browser on the screen. Much faster, especially on X-Windows remote connections. Since it's the same process, you don't have to log in again, etc ... the problem is that some people want it this way, some don't.

The workaround since Firefox 2 (previously it was an environment variable) is to use a commandline argument for the second process. The easiest way is to add it to the properties of the shortcut that you use (second link below), so that it's used for all Firefox processes.

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Opening_a_new_instance_of_Firefox_with_another_profile
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Command_line_arguments