Attempting to open several pages for help documentation using firefox, and running into an odd issue. The first file/link opens just fine, but subsequent links get the popup: "Firefox is already running, but is not responding. To open a new window, you must first close the existing Firefox process, or restart your system". Methods I've attempted to get the second link to open: firefox -new-tab /path/to/file.html firefox -P profile_name -new-tab /path/to/file.html firefox -remote "openURL(/path/to/file.html)" firefox -P profile_name -remote "openURL(/path/to/file.html)" Set "StartWithLastProfile=0" in profiles.ini and attempt to select the in-use profile manually. Results in "Firefox cannot use the profile "profile_name" because it is in use. To continue, close the running instance of Firefox or choose a different profile." popup. The only way I've found to make subsequent links open at all is to make multiple profiles and open each link with a new profile. Took a cue from this question's solution: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1130718 I attempted to replicate that with xdg-open, to no success. My best workaround is quite messy, running a script every time I need a new file / webpage opened by the application: set time = `date +%s` set profile_path = ~/firefox/$time/ cp –irp $generic_profile $profile_path firefox --profile $profile_path /what/ever.html rm –rf $profile_path Which comes with a side effect of not allowing interaction between the firefox windows, since they're all effectively different profiles.