From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8) Gecko/20051109 Fedora/1.5-0.5.0.rc1.NOEL.1 Firefox/1.5 Description of problem: Firefox currently seems only to be able to handle one profile at a time, ie. if you start it with one profile you can't start another instance using another profile. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): firefox-1.5-0.5.0.rc1 How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Setup firefox with two profiles: profile1, profile2 2. firefox -P profile1 3. firefox -P 4. firefox -P profile2 Actual Results: 3. Opens new window in the "profile1" instance 4. Opens new window in the "profile1" instance Expected Results: 3. Start new instance showing profile manager 4. Start new instance using profile2 Additional info: I took the Rawhide SRPM and was able to compile it for RHEL4 after minor modifications (disable pango, disable system cairo, nspr -> mozilla-nspr). After noticing the profile problem I tried to re-compile with "ac_add_options --disable-single-profile" added to firefox-mozprofile but then the build fails with: gmake[1]: Entering directory `/workarea/rpm/BUILD/mozilla/profile/src' nsProfile.cpp c++ -o nsProfile.o ... In file included from nsProfile.cpp:39: nsProfile.h:46:31: nsICmdLineService.h: No such file or directory nsProfile.cpp:80:34: nsIChromeRegistrySea.h: No such file or directory ... gmake[1]: *** [nsProfile.o] Error 1 nsProfileAccess.cpp c++ -o nsProfileAccess.o ... In file included from nsProfileAccess.cpp:41: nsProfile.h:46:31: nsICmdLineService.h: No such file or directory gmake[1]: *** [nsProfileAccess.o] Error 1 It seems that the current Firefox 1.5RC1 only compiles for single profile usage...
Problem still exists in 1.5 RC3. I've now also reported it to upstream <https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=317040>
This is intentional according to <https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=271191> "To enable multiple Firefox instances, you need to set MOZ_NO_REMOTE=1 as an environment variable in Windows, otherwise, invoking Firefox will always add to the current instance. This is by design and not likely to change at any time in the forseeable future." I verified that this environment variable works. This variable seems to be new for Firefox 1.5 as it worked without it in Firefox 1.0.x.
See also <https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=308076>
*** Bug 164856 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***