Two Desktops, Two Monitors, One Firefox.

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servo888 · Post by **servo888** » Sat Jul 16, 2005 2:24 am

I'm having some issues with running firefox on my two monitor two kde instance display setup. It seems once I start firefox on one desktop, each time I load up firefox (on any desktop) it opens it on the first desktop. So if I open up firefox on desktop one, and try to open up firefox on desktop two it will load the new window on desktop one. I think it has something to do with the profiles that firefox has - but I don't get that 'profile in use' pop menu (so it might not be that). If you don't quite understand my two display setup, the way it works is I have setup two monitors and screens in the xorg.conf, as well as two devices (I have a dual head nvidia card). So then I startx on display 0:0 and the window manager opens up a second desktop on display 0:1. This way I get 3d acceleration on both screens, and can run on different resolutions without using virtual displays.

If anybody could help me out that would be great.

Arno Nymous · Post by **Arno Nymous** » Sat Jul 16, 2005 5:43 am

firefox --help shows this option:

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X11 options
        --display=DISPLAY               X display to use

I don't have two displays but I would expect that in "check for running windows" firefox will check for the each display seperately.

cybermatthieu · Post by **cybermatthieu** » Sat Sep 17, 2005 6:54 am

Hi,
I have the same problem here! No solution yet but still searching...

I'll let you know if I find anything,
Matt

bitwise · Post by **bitwise** » Sat Sep 17, 2005 7:08 am

the mozilla-launcher script is most likely to blame. have a look at it in /usr/libexec/mozilla-launcher. I'm tired as hell, but it looks like the 'find_running()' function is what you want to look at. You'd have to trick the new window to open on a different display, simply getting it to run a new instance won't work due to the profiles issue you mentioned.

Dlareh · Post by **Dlareh** » Sat Sep 17, 2005 7:13 am

I use the portage version in screen 1, and a binary installed manually from www.mozilla.org on screen 2. That way when it crashes on one screen, at least I don't lose whatever is running on the other screen.

Plus whenever firefox gets confused and locks up the whole instance, the other instance is responsive...

cybermatthieu · Post by **cybermatthieu** » Fri Sep 23, 2005 6:02 am

Hi,
For now I'm using firefox on one screen and mozilla on the other... They are really similar.
But I took a look at the laucher script and It looks like he could be responsible for this.

Matt

sawatts · Post by **sawatts** » Sun Oct 30, 2005 12:40 pm

(bump)

Same situation as original poster here -- dual display, but Firefox only started on one display. *Very* irritating.

Tried invoking 'firefox -display $DISPLAY' from the second display (with firefox running on the first). This gets me to the mozilla profile dialog, since profile 'default' is already in use. Don't really want to have to mess around with seperate profiles for each display...

I see that 'mozilla-launcher' script is setting the 'DISPLAY' envar in the 'try_running()' script - presumable to the display on which it found the running instance?

Is it possible, at all, to run Firefox on two displays from the same profile? There shouldn't be any technical reason why not -- other than assumptions built into the code?

pioto · Post by **pioto** » Sun Oct 30, 2005 12:52 pm

sawatts wrote:Is it possible, at all, to run Firefox on two displays from the same profile? There shouldn't be any technical reason why not -- other than assumptions built into the code?

I think I read somewhere that Firefox stores some of its data, such as images, in the X resource database. If I understand that correctly, that would mean that these images would only be accessible on one display, not both. I'm sure that somehow this must mean that Firefox is very unwilling to open the same profile, the same session in essence, when it doesn't really have access to everything it should.

If your two displays are on one machine, why not use Xinerama? Again, I don't have any experience with it, but it seems like it would allow you to run the same Firefox instance, as they share a common DISPLAY, and just have some windows on one monitor, and some windows on another one. Or are you trying to achieve something different here?

If you're trying to do something like run one isntance locally on your machine, and run another instance forwarded through SSH, then I'm as frustrated as you. The only options I've found are to:

have a separate profile
have a separate browser
just connect to my local desktop through VNC or something similar

Best of luck.

je_fro · Post by **je_fro** » Mon Dec 12, 2005 12:56 pm

Anybody found a fix for this yet? Having FF on only one or the other monitor is a huge pita.

Even if I do:

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DISPLAY=:0.0 firefox && DISPLAY=:0.1 firefox

It still just opens 2 firefoxes in :0.0.

xaos5 · Post by **xaos5** » Mon Dec 12, 2005 1:45 pm

twinview supports 3d accel on both monitors and also different resolutions on each display. easy way to do it is setup twinview in my opinion.

je_fro · Post by **je_fro** » Mon Dec 12, 2005 1:51 pm

that might work, but I don't want twinview.

xaos5 · Post by **xaos5** » Mon Dec 12, 2005 2:02 pm

not sure what to tell you then, I have no experience there.

je_fro · Post by **je_fro** » Tue Dec 13, 2005 11:27 am

Looks like this one isn't going to get fixed unless I do it myself...

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=285954

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=319965

Funny that mozilla works flawlessly though.....

trolley · Post by **trolley** » Tue Jun 19, 2007 5:44 pm

I have a dual head setup using the proprietary ATI drivers. If I try to run Firefox on my second monitor it opens on my first. Any ideas how to fix that?

desultory · Post by **desultory** » Wed Jun 20, 2007 4:42 am

Merged the above post.

je_fro · Post by **je_fro** » Wed Jun 20, 2007 6:46 am

here's my bug https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=319965
I don't have a lot of hope in getting it fixed...what I've done in the meantime is to create another user "screen1" and add all my ~/.mozilla files to his homedir.
I can launch firefox on screen1 now with "sudo -u screen1 -H /opt/firefox/firefox-bin"

trolley · Post by **trolley** » Wed Jun 20, 2007 11:39 am

desultory wrote:Merged the above post.

Thanks, I searched but didn't find this

gr0x0rd · Post by **gr0x0rd** » Wed Dec 31, 2008 11:49 pm

Three and a half years later and still no logical solution. Just upgraded to FF3, and in doing so unmerged epiphany, which wants to pull ff2 back in. Been using epiphany on my second display to watch live sports until now... lame. Looks like I'm going back to FF2.

desultory · Post by **desultory** » Thu Jan 01, 2009 3:56 am

gr0x0rd wrote:Just upgraded to FF3, and in doing so unmerged epiphany, which wants to pull ff2 back in. Been using epiphany on my second display to watch live sports until now... lame. Looks like I'm going back to FF2.

In which case you could either update to a more recent version of www-client/epiphany than you had been using, or enable the xulrunner USE flag for it and reinstall the same version.

gr0x0rd · Post by **gr0x0rd** » Sat Jan 03, 2009 12:39 am

thanks d, I just found this at gentoo bugzilla as well and came back to update this thread... I had to do an emerge --sync first as well

be warned, xulrunner takes a while to compile.

Two Desktops, Two Monitors, One Firefox.

Two Desktops, Two Monitors, One Firefox.

Temp solution

anything yet?

hmm...

Firefox refuses to open on second monitor