From: Sean Conner Date: 20:30 on 25 Jan 2007 Subject: Okay Firefox, that's ... interesting. Now cut it out! I'm working remotely today, and I need to log into the trouble ticket system (a web-based interface). Since I am remote, I don't have the trouble ticket system bookmarked or in the history of the Firefox instance I'm using, so I type it in by hand and get a site that I don't expect (a domain squatter). Obviously I didn't remember the URL correctly, but that's not that much of a problem. The system I'm currently using is Linux with X. My computer at work is Linux that runs X. Easy enough, just ssh to my workstation with X forwarding and run firefox. Sure, it might be a bit sluggish, but I can get the URL I need. ssh -X myworkstation.at.work.net blah blah blah GeneralUnixPrompt> firefox And sure enough, Firefox comes up. But ... it doesn't look right. The history shows the site I *tried* going to, and the bookmarks aren't quite right either. And why did the Unix prompt on my workstation come back? It should still be running Firefox. Some testing, and yes, I try to run firefox on my workstation, and somehow the instance running locally is notified to pop open a new window. No, I don't *want* that behavior. I truely do want to run Firefox on my workstation! Don't make me close my local Firefox ... Sigh. I'll close my local Firefox. Only *then* did I get the Firefox I wanted. I specifically use Linux *because* it has a history of not being user friendly and doing *exactly* what you tell it to. This business of being *clever* is disconcerting. I wish it would stop when I wanted it to stop. -spc (I suppose there's some command line option to get the behavior I want, but I certainly didn't see it when I ran "firefox -h")
From: jrodman Date: 22:18 on 25 Jan 2007 Subject: Re: Okay Firefox, that's ... interesting. Now cut it out! On Thu, Jan 25, 2007 at 03:30:23PM -0500, Sean Conner wrote: > Obviously I didn't remember the URL correctly, but that's not that much of > a problem. The system I'm currently using is Linux with X. My computer at > work is Linux that runs X. Easy enough, just ssh to my workstation with X > forwarding and run firefox. Sure, it might be a bit sluggish, but I can get > the URL I need. That you have to open a gui instead of just grepping the obvious datafile is kind of hateful. (And you really do. Where is the profile? .mozilla .firefox? in something mumble/default/md5hash/idiocy/something/ Then the bookmarks.js or whatever is a tag-soup of incomprehensible junk..) > Sigh. I'll close my local Firefox. > > Only *then* did I get the Firefox I wanted. > > I specifically use Linux *because* it has a history of not being user > friendly and doing *exactly* what you tell it to. This business of being > *clever* is disconcerting. I wish it would stop when I wanted it to stop. > > -spc (I suppose there's some command line option to get the behavior I > want, but I certainly didn't see it when I ran "firefox -h") It seems the switch you are looking for is -no-remote. And yes, it does not appear with you run firefox -h, because firefox -h gives you the sitches supported by the program firefox. What's this -no-remote then, you say? Well THAT switch is implemented by the wrapper script. Pish tosh, a wrapper script is some silly linux distribution script, you would think. But look at the license and the copyright and you'll find this is part of the standard firefox distribution. The method for getting the wrapper script appears to be to open it in vi. At least, that's the method I used. My firefox manpage does mention it too, but that's hardly an excuse. Apparently you can also 'export MOZ_NO_REMOTE=1' although I suspect you'll be unhappy with the eventually memory load if you leave that in your environment generally. Why put obvious switches for program behavior into a wrapper script? I have no idea. I see vague hints that these are "mozilla" options, as opposed to "firefox" options. Whatever that means. "remote" also fails my clarity test. They are referring to the idea of "a remote" as in a control widgety thing that controls the central device. But that is pretty ambiguous when dealing with a windowing envonment whose probably sole advantage is that it is network transparent. And as for Linux being a 'do what I say without helping (hurting)' kind of platform, I'd say it has a pretty good track record trending towards helping (hurting). It hasn't gotten quite so far at this as more popular systems yet, but my recent survey has suggested no one is immune. Cf. OpenBSD's /etc/myname. Whose name? Wow that's friendly. -josh
From: Robert Rothenberg Date: 17:05 on 26 Jan 2007 Subject: Re: Okay Firefox, that's ... interesting. Now cut it out! On 25/01/07 22:18 jrodman@xxxx.xxxxxxxxxx.xxx wrote: > That you have to open a gui instead of just grepping the obvious > datafile is kind of hateful. (And you really do. Where is the profile? > .mozilla .firefox? in something mumble/default/md5hash/idiocy/something/ > Then the bookmarks.js or whatever is a tag-soup of incomprehensible junk..) Finding a profile for mozilla based software is easy. Just find the profiles.ini to get the pathnames to where profiles are. Figuring out where it is isn't hard, you just have to check several variations of .mozilla, .mozilla-firefox, .firefox, in several directories (even on the same platform). Hateful? Not as much as actually parsing the mork file format: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mork_(file_format)
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