Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 46912
netscape "remote" window startup doesn't work, cripples other stuff
Last modified: 2008-05-01 11:38:00 EDT
From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux 2.4.5-10smp i686; en-US; rv:0.9.1) Gecko/20010609 Description of problem: Many programs "activate" URLs by calling netscape on them. Since netscape may fully run only as a single instance, it has a way to "pass" the URL to the "running" copy of netscape, which would spawn a new window with the aforementioned URL. Below is an example of such "new window" invocation: netscape -install -remote 'openUrl(http://www.redhat.com,new-window)' KDE both in beta1 and in 7.1 breaks this feature. An attempt to spawn a new window results in one of the following outcomes: - it effectively starts a new instance of netscape, which complains about the fact and is not capable to update bookmarks. - it exits with the following error: netscape-communicator: root window has no children on display :0.0 How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1.Start KDE, start emacs, start GNUS 2.Start netscape 3.In GNUS, find some article w/ URL (it'll be marked as "active") and middle-click on it. Actual Results: One of the errors above Expected Results: Netscape is supposed to spawn another window w/ the URL Additional info: This problem has been discussed for a while on the KDE forum - it seems to be due to screwed up way kwm handles the root window.
Looks like netscape can't handle the perfectly valid things kdesktop and kwin do to the root window. Without access to the Netscape source, we can't fix it - and without access to the Netscape source, it'll be VERY hard to figure out what's causing it and possibly put a workaround into KDE.