If one clicks a second link when firefox is opening, they get an error

[Aaron Whitehouse]

If I have firefox open and I click two external links (say, in an email in Thunderbird) in quick succession then both links will open correctly in new tabs. This is the expected behaviour.

If I click the same two links in quick succession when firefox is not open then the same does not occur. The first link clicked will start to open firefox but the second will give an error that firefox is already running.

What should happen is that no error should be displayed and, when firefox has finished loading, a second tab should be opened with the second link. This is not only consistent with the behaviour that occurs when it is running, but is also consistent with common sense.

Running a fully updated Dapper Beta.

[Aaron Whitehouse (aaron-whitehouse)]

This is a screencap of the error message.

[Emmet Hikory (persia)]

The difficulty here is that before Firefox has finished loading and announced appropriate communication channels to the rest of the system, other applications cannot determine that there is no requirement to open Firefox afresh. Perhaps the Firefox behaviour when detecting an already running Firefox process could be altered to open a new tab in the preexisting instance, and only raising an error if this fails, rather than the current error message.

[Alexander Sack (asac)]

this bug is probably known to upstream already ... marking for upstream triage.

[Alexander Sack (asac)]

Anyway, this is importance LOW

[Mysha (mysha)]

Hi,
45756 is not an exact duplicate, as it indicates a more general case than just opening from a link. But we can add that to this one, of course: Starting up an instance of Firefox when there's another, non-active instance, will always block, without a way to continue.

* Start up two instances from a menu or dock - same effect.
* Close down one instance, realise you forgot something, and start a new instance - same effect.

Other software may have dialog boxes up that they close again when the reported status changes. It's like FireFox doesn't test for such a change. It seems to note another instance, and then to initiate communications with that instance. From that point on it just sits waiting until it times out.

A quick fix would be to add a retry button to the dialog box, so it could be made to check again, and now find either the other instance had disappeared or could actually accept communications. The real fix would probably be to have it recheck the other instance after the time out, and have it retry even after putting up the dialog box. (Not to mention that inter-instances communication ought to be very early on start-up and very late on shut-down.)

And considering that this is an error I encounter daily, I'd like to offer the opinion that status LOW is not all that high.

(I don't have the time to figure it out, but would some kind soul report that I didn't get this bug listed under my bugreports? Apparently because it only lists bugs you're involved in but doesn't list duplicates. I wasn't directly involved in this one, and 45756, that I reported, is now a duplicate. The result was that neither showed up.)