[Wylug-help] Mozilla SSH - My sanity

[Smylers]

David Whiteley writes:

> Mozilla "knows" that I already have a mozilla running on my desktop
> from server one and somehow re-uses it.  
> 
> Unless I am going mad?

No, you aren't mad -- that does happen.  I first encountered this
behaviour with Netscape Navigator 4.

> Is this normal?

Yes.  I think the idea is that if you start a second instance of your
browser (for example by following a link in an IM or e-mail message)
then it's actually better for that instance to spot that your browser is
already running, pass the link to the existing instance (which can open
a new window or whatever), and then quit.  That way you don't have 2
separate browser instances in memory, both trying to write to your
bookmarks and history files and whatever.

The way some browsers communicate with other instances of themselves is
by setting some flag in their X server.  This of course means that you
only get one browser per display, not per computer that you're invoking
URLs from.  (In some cases this could be helpful: you can have your
browser running locally, but still invoke it from remote servers.)

> Can I stop it?

Try mozilla -help to see if there's an option.  Or if mozilla is
actually a shell script, poking around in it and finding mozilla.real or
mozilla-bin or whatever and invoking that directly may help.

I'm not sure that Firefox still uses the X flag for communicating
between its processes.  But you could work round the problem by using
Mozilla on one server and, say, Opera on another.  (Or Lynx.  Lynx is
good!)

Hope that's some help ...

Smylers