779422 - Starting Firefox stops Windows console from exiting

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 787313

(Toolkit :: Startup and Profile System, defect)

Description

[Luke Usherwood]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:15.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/15.0
Build ID: 20120724191344

Steps to reproduce:

For a long time I have used a script to start selected applications after starting Windows (7), and I've hit a bizarre regression in one of the recent Firefox Beta updates.

It can be produced simply like this:
 1. Open a console (cmd.exe)
 2. Type: start "" "C:\Program Files\Firefox\Firefox.exe"
 3. (Optional: do other things)
 4. Type: exit


Actual results:

 * The console does not exit
 * The cursor moves to the next line, but the console remains frozen. 
 * Pressing Ctrl+C in the console kills firefox


Expected results:

 * The console should exit on the "exit" command, and Firefox should continue to run. (Due to the "start" command.)

It's bizarre because other commands (step 3) still work, so the start command "sort of" worked, except the lifetime of the console and Firefox are somehow still linked.

Comment 1

[Ioana (away)]

WFM with Firefox 15.0 beta 5

Comment 2

[Luke Usherwood]

Still happening here (latest on 15.0 Beta channel)...

  C:\Users\lukeu>start "" "C:\Programs\Internet\Firefox\Firefox.exe"
  
  C:\Users\lukeu>exit
  Running global cleanup code from study base classes.

Interestingly: this time the "global cleanup" message appeared a few seconds after typing "exit". Not sure if that's a clue.

I've also tried manually disabling all addons and plugins (via the GUI). No change there.

Comment 3

[Luke Usherwood]

Reproduced on a second computer. (Win7-64 professional. Similar upgrade history.)

Comment 4

[Dave Townsend [:mossop]]

Perhaps caused by bug 673383?

Comment 5

[Alexandre Poirot [:ochameau]]

Definitely caused by bug 673383.

Firefox now attach its std IO to parent console, if launched from a console.
So that -console becomes optionnal. The side effect of this is that firefox now binds to the console, which seems to prevent it from exiting until firefox quits. If you use /WAIT argument, you will be able to see firefox output directly into your command line (when using dump() method):
> start "" /WAIT "C:\Programs\Internet\Firefox\Firefox.exe"

If possible, I'd like to avoid adding yet another argument to enable this. But I don't see how to preserve `start` behavior. What is your goal behind this usage of start?

Comment 6

[Luke Usherwood]

> What is your goal behind this usage of start?

I have a couple of scripts that I use each morning to launch a set of applications depending on what I'll be doing (writing software, sorting photos/albums, or something else = no script).