firefox on two displays

[Karl Auer]

On Mon, 2006-10-23 at 10:02 +0100, Richard Urwin wrote:
> Firefox just doesn't have the option (unless someone wants to jump in and
> correct me) to select which display a new window is to run on.

New windows no - a new fireox process yes. You can use
--display=<display> to start firefox on any desired display. New windows
opened by that process will start on the same display.

> So the only way to open a new window on a different display is to start a
> new Firefox process.

Apparently. The big question is *why*?

If I run firefox from the taskbar (the launcher command line is "firefox
%U"), it opens a new window on the same display, no problems. as many as
I want. All belonging to one process. If I click the same launcher on a
different display (that is, same launcher command issued from a taskbar
on a different display), firefox complains - it doesn't seem able to
link the deisred new window to the currently running process.

It does this even when the lock file has been removed; how does it know?

> Two Firefox processes can not share the same profile.

No problem with that. The question is, why does firefox want a new
process just because it is being started on a different display?

> The solution is to ask the Firefox developers to modify the "open new
> window" function to allow selection of the X display. That would be trivial
> if you could get them interested.

That would indeed be nice, but more than I want. I am quite happy for
new windows to simply start up on the current display - whichever I
happen to be on.

> There is nothing intrinsically difficult in allowing multiple processes to
> the share a single profile; a change from one process could get reflected
> immediately in the others. However since it hasn't been done already, I
> imagine the code is too entangled. It's one of those things you need to
> design for.

I have no need for shared profiles.

Regards, K.

-- 
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Karl Auer (kauer at biplane.com.au)                   +61-2-64957160 (h)
http://www.biplane.com.au/~kauer/                  +61-428-957160 (mob)