733565 - firefox -remote 'openURL(..)' stopped working

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Firefox :: Untriaged, defect)

Description

[Chris Ball]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:10.0.2) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/10.0.2
Build ID: 20120215223356

Steps to reproduce:

start firefox from a terminal:
bang:D:~> firefox
try to open a new window in the running firefox from another terminal:
bang:D:~> firefox -remote 'openURL(http://www.mozilla.com, new-window)'
Error: No running window found

Test 1.)
Verify it isn't just me
Simple, I'll su up to root in the couple of terminals and make sure that things still don't work.
root@bang:~# firefox
root@bang:~# firefox -remote 'openURL(http://www.mozilla.com, new-window)'
Hmm, the test works fine as root.  The new window appears as expected.

Test 2.)
Well, if it is just me maybe something has gone pear shaped with my config.
bang:D:~> mv .mozilla .mozilla.old
Repeat test as above.
Nope, that didn't fix anything.  Still get no new window and receive the no running window found error.

Test 3.) 
Well it used to work and I didn't delete the old firefox installation, lets just see.
bang:D:/usr/bin# cd /usr/bin
bang:D:/usr/bin# ls -l firefox
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 31 Mar  2 16:57 firefox -> /usr/lib64/firefox-10.0/firefox
bang:D:/usr/bin# rm firefox
bang:D:/usr/bin# ln -s /usr/lib64/firefox-8.0.1/firefox .
Rerun test as above.
Now new windows work again.

Conclusion:
Something has broken the -remote functionality between firefox 8.0.1 and firefox 10.0 -10.0.2 but only for non-root users.  

On a related note, the URL below has a link to the details of -remote operation that is a 404.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Command_Line_Options


Actual results:

Instead of getting a new window in my running firefox, I see the error:
Error: No running window found



Expected results:

I should have seen a new window appear in my firefox session

Comment 1

[Chris Ball]

Just checked with a buddy who is running the 32 bit version of the same release of the same distribution, and a test reveals that he isn't having the same issues.  So it appears to also be 64bit OS only problem.

Comment 2

[Chris Ball]

More dredging eventually revealed that sometime in the distant past I had set "MOZ_NO_REMOTE=1" in a .bashrc file. Starting with FF10 this seems to mean something different from what it meant in the past and disallowed multiple connections, my vague recollection was that this was needed to allow multiple connections at some point.