complich8’s journal

Ok, so check it out. This is like … the single strangest thing I’ve run into in the wide world of linux.

So, you start a local firefox session, then ssh to a machine with a -X (enabling x11 forwarding). Then on the remote machine, you run firefox. You get … another locally-running firefox.

So you close both locally-running firefox sessions (and any others you might have) and invoke firefox on the remote machine. Now you get an X11-forwarded firefox running on the remote box (the expected behavior). And then you run firefox on the local machine, and you get …. another remotely-running firefox window.

Apparently, Xorg doesn’t differentiate between remotely-running windows and locally-running ones, and firefox catches any requests for a new X window named firefox, and instead of letting another copy be run, just makes a new window on the same firefox instance.

A little googling shows that the environment variable MOZ_NO_REMOTE controls this behavior — set it to 1 and firefox doesn’t lurk under the surface intercepting other instances that try to run.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 28th, 2007 at 4:19 pm and is filed under Beyond Nerddom, technobabble. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.