Remote Firefox over X/SSH
Here’s a quick tip…
I was trying to get a Firefox session running over an SSH connection between my desktop PC (Ubuntu 7.10) and the little server I’m building. The strange thing was, every time I typed firefox & at the command line prompt, it started Firefox all right; but it started a local (Ubuntu) instance of it with my local profile settings! One of the reasons I wanted to run a remote browser was so I could download files directly to that machine and so I could access some html docs on that box; as it is now headless.
A bit of Googling led me here, where the author used this command ( export MOZ_NO_REMOTE=1; firefox -profilemanager ) &. After a bit of experimentation, and more Googling, for my purposes it can be simplified to this:
firefox -no-remote &
This assumes Firefox version 2 and that your SSH connection was made using ssh -X uname@host
Hope this helps someone else. It got me foxed for ages initially…
[...] connections locally) a remotely invoked Firefox may simply open a new window in the local instance. Here’s a workaround (spoiler: use the -no-remote command-line [...]
Nice - just what I was looking for