From: Timothy Knox Date: 21:47 on 20 Feb 2008 Subject: Hating firefox and remote I spend my days in heavily Linux-y environment. My main machine is a Linux box, my dev box is Linux, my client-test box and my server-test box are all Linux boxes. Woo-hoo! I can run firefox on any of my boxes...or can I? Those of you who like to skip ahead to the end know the answer to this: Of course not! If I am running firefox on my main box, and am ssh-ed in to (for example) my client-text box, and try to run firefox there, surprise! Firefox, in its infinite hatefulness, decides that I must really want to run a firefox remote window in the firefox back on my main box. I couldn't possibly want to have a distinct instance of firefox on my client-test box, now could I? If, for example, my client-test box has TWO NICs, and one of them connects (via another box) to my server box, and I want to access my server box via the client box? Without all that tedious mucking about with routing tables (which is a hate all its own)? If, for example, the client-test, server-test, and intermediary box are all on a private subnet that I cannot reach from my main box? GRRRRR! Fortunately, the hatefulness is only about 99%, because the firefox command exposed on the command line is really a shell script that wraps around the REAL firefox command, and does the evil remote thing. So it was not too painful to hack it up to allow me to opt out of the whole evil remote thing, but: 1. What a pian! 2. The next time I upgrade I will need to reapply this fix. Grrr! Why can't firefox support this behaviour? I can understand not having it on by default, as I assume the thinking was that this behaviour would confuse the fewest number of people, but come on! Firefox is all about customisability, and yet there is no convenient hook for disabling this behaviour that I could find. It took me all of five lines of shell hacking to add it in, so we are not talking rocket science here. Firefox, burn in hell forever!
From: Steff Davies Date: 21:55 on 20 Feb 2008 Subject: Re: Hating firefox and remote Timothy Knox wrote: > I spend my days in heavily Linux-y environment. My main machine is a Linux box, > my dev box is Linux, my client-test box and my server-test box are all Linux > boxes. Woo-hoo! I can run firefox on any of my boxes...or can I? IIRC setting the environment variable MOZ_NO_REMOTE (catchy!) disables this behaviour. As violations of the principle of least astonishment go, though, it's a doozy. S
From: Timothy Knox Date: 22:07 on 20 Feb 2008 Subject: Re: Hating firefox and remote Somewhere on Shadow Earth, at Wed, Feb 20, 2008 at 09:55:30PM +0000, Steff Davies wrote: > Timothy Knox wrote: >> I spend my days in heavily Linux-y environment. My main machine is a Linux >> box, >> my dev box is Linux, my client-test box and my server-test box are all >> Linux >> boxes. Woo-hoo! I can run firefox on any of my boxes...or can I? > > IIRC setting the environment variable MOZ_NO_REMOTE (catchy!) disables this > behaviour. As violations of the principle of least astonishment go, though, > it's a doozy. Is that your final answer? ;-) Of course that doesn't work, at least on the firefox installed on CentOS 5. No that would be too easy! :-) However, curiously enough, when I hacked up the firefox wrapper to add that capability, I called the variable MOZ_NO_REMOTE (probably in half-remembered tribute to the long ago variable of the same name).
From: Steff Davies Date: 22:34 on 20 Feb 2008 Subject: Re: Hating firefox and remote Timothy Knox wrote: >> IIRC setting the environment variable MOZ_NO_REMOTE (catchy!) disables this >> behaviour. As violations of the principle of least astonishment go, though, >> it's a doozy. > > Is that your final answer? ;-) Of course that doesn't work, at least on the > firefox installed on CentOS 5. No that would be too easy! :-) Works here, though if you have a firefox already running on the machine you ssh to, you'll need to create a new profile: steff@stinkpad:~$ ssh -Y lhasa steff@lhasa:~$ export MOZ_NO_REMOTE=1 steff@lhasa:~$ firefox [a dialogue box tells me that firefox is already running but not responding] steff@lhasa:~$ firefox -Profilemanager [create new profile, all is fine and dandy] This is from Feisty (stinkpad) to Gutsy (lhasa). Firefox version is 2.0.0.12+2nobinonly+2-0ubuntu0.7.10 on lhasa. S
From: Aristotle Pagaltzis Date: 10:39 on 21 Feb 2008 Subject: Re: Hating firefox and remote * Timothy Knox <tdk@xxxxxxxx.xxx> [2008-02-20 23:00]: > So it was not too painful to hack it up to allow > me to opt out of the whole evil remote thing The Tao of Firefox flows far away and returns on the wind of morning. The wrapper script in an official FF2 release takes a `-no-remote` switch that is not listed when you pass `-help`. How could it be otherwise? Regards,
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