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Thunderbird can't open links if Firefox is open

  • 3 replies
  • 10 have this problem
  • 4 views
  • Paskiausią atsakymą parašė rsx11m

citizen539
citizen539
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This behavior keeps reverting. I used to be able to click on a link in email and it would open in a new tab of Firefox, when Firefox was already running. Now I am getting that dumb message that says "Firefox is already running..." I'm tired of copy & pasting links to the browser.

Why did this regress and where can I report this bug? And I am using Linux, just as a FYI. FF 30 & TB 24.6

This behavior keeps reverting. I used to be able to click on a link in email and it would open in a new tab of Firefox, when Firefox was already running. Now I am getting that dumb message that says "Firefox is already running..." I'm tired of copy & pasting links to the browser. Why did this regress and where can I report this bug? And I am using Linux, just as a FYI. FF 30 & TB 24.6

Modified by citizen539

All Replies (3)

rsx11m
rsx11m
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This sounds like the call to the default browser is trying to create a new Firefox instance rather than using the existing one. The message you see indicates that a new instance (process) is trying to use the profile which is however accessed by another process. It would work with a different profile, but that's not what you want.

  • When you open Firefox manually and look at in Help → About from the menu, then close it and do the same from a link in a message, is the version opened the same? If not, the default browser may still pointing to an old Firefox installation which didn't get cleaned up properly on an update.
  • If you can figure out how the default browser command is defined, does it have any option -no-remote or -new-instance? If yes, remove those parts from the command line.
  • In a terminal window, run printenv and see if either MOZ_NO_REMOTE or MOZ_NEW_INSTANCE are defined in the environment. This would prompt Mozilla applications to start new processes rather than to latch onto existing ones as well.
citizen539
citizen539 Klausimą uždavęs asmuo
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FF version is 30 no matter what I do. Nothing odd here.

printenv does not show MOZ_ anything at all no matter how I try I get exactly the same info each time.

I did figure out that the reason it works then stops working is if I click a link when FF is not running, that link and every link after will open FF and a tab for every other link. If I have FF open then open TB and click a link, I will get the nasty message.

I have 3 profiles on this computer and I use 2 of them multiple times daily, they all have -no-remote. If I remove that from my default FF profile, it will work correctly regardless of any circumstances. Unfortunately the FF profiles must have -no-remote. Is that what is causing the issue? Any work around if that's the case?

rsx11m
rsx11m
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Unfortunately, the profile invoked for the default browser must not be called with the -no-remote option. If that profile is already used by a "normal" instance you'll get the profile-in-use error. Thus, the only option I'd see is to have a separate profile for the default browser (not invoked with -no-remote) which is never used with the other instances running with the -no-remote option. That might work.