Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 449188
Firefox incorrectly detects another running instance
Last modified: 2008-10-30 05:14:57 EDT
Description of problem: Firefox won't start due to a claim that it's already running. It brings up a dialog box, saying: 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. The only problem is that there isn't an existing firefox process on that box. However, there is a running firefox on another box, and my home directory is NFS mounted, and hence shared between the two. I can't believe this behaviour is intentional. After all, it's been possible to run two instances of a browser on multiple boxen pretty much since the dawn of the web. It's quite a regression that we're unable to do so now... Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): firefox-3.0-0.60.beta5.fc9.x86_64 How reproducible: Every time Steps to Reproduce: 1. NFS mount your home directory on two boxen 2. Start firefox on the first box 3. Attempt to start firefox on the second box
If you want to run two independent instances of the browser in the same home, create a different profile for each box. It's not a bug, it's intentional because of the session management.
Wrong. Maybe Firefox has made such braindead design decisions. But the bug still stands. Firefox *is* still incorrectly detecting another running instance, and neither of the proposed actions in the error message will work. At the very least, the error message needs fixing.
If you want to continue this discussion, we filed this bug in the upstream database (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=462311) and believe that it is more appropriate to let it be resolved upstream. Red Hat will continue to track the issue in the centralized upstream bug tracker, and will review any bug fixes that become available for consideration in future updates. Thank you for the bug report.