Thunderbird can't open links if Firefox is open
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)
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.
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?
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.