Sanity Compromised by Firefox and ssh X Forwarding
Try this in Linux: open Firefox on your local machine. Then open a terminal window and ssh to another machine using the -X option for X forwarding. On the remote machine, start Firefox. The behavior I get is so bizarre that it cannot be a bug — somehow this looks intentional. The Firefox process on the remote machine sits for a few moments and then dies. Then a new local Firefox window opens. WTF?
I thought I was going insane. The people at the OSL that I told about this thought I was insane. The Mozilla developers that I work with and tried to explain this to thought I was insane.
Some research shows this: the remote Firefox actually starts and communicates with the X server running on the local machine. The X server tells the remote Firefox that there is already a process called Firefox running. The remote Firefox then sends a message to the local one to open a new window and then the remote Firefox dies. This protects a user from creating too many instances of a Firefox process on their machine. Clever, huh? But totally WRONG and counterintuitive!
Apparently you can stop this behavior if you start the remote Firefox with the intuitively named “no-remote” switch. That prevents the remote Firefox from “connecting” to the local Firefox.
Sigh, there goes an hour of my life that I’d like to have back…
March 8th, 2008 at 2:34 pm
Noticed a similar odd case when running dual monitors with separate X screens. Try opening firefox in both screens. Try opening from email with and w/o firefox open on the opposite screen. Results seem to vary with distro which is also interesting. Not sure if it’s related to your compromised sanity, but similar weirdness thats had me pulling my hair out at times (wait I have a shaved head).
November 29th, 2008 at 1:22 am
This wasted an hour of my life as well. I completely agree with you, the behaviour is NOT intuitive at all.