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…
Tags: Firefox, Open Source, X
[...] 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
Thank you! This very problem has been driving me insane for a year.
thanks a lot from spain. works perfectly for me
this helps with Firefox 3.0.1 remotely with Fedora 9
Before firefox would start but then close with an error message about firefox already running (even if it was not)
( export MOZ_NO_REMOTE=1; firefox -profilemanager )
solved my problem
many thanx
cheers -malcolm
Many thanks from Poland too
Good work! I don’t understand why firefox –help do not explain this…
Firefox 2.0.0.16 and SuSE Linux Enterprise 9 from Novell
This works!
Aha! Thanks!
@everyone so far.
Thanks for commenting. I thought “helpdeskdan” summed it up well.
That’s exactly what I thought when I found it too!
Thank you very much for this! I was wondering, how it is possible that local instance is always started, even from remote server. Parameter “-no-remote” did the job, however I still do not understand what’s going on there…
thanks very much from london
[...] already running, firefox process. This also affects trying to start firefox remotely over X as I discovered quite some time [...]
Hey I never had this problem with FF and SSH.
However, I had another one and I think it can be useful to tell the solution here. My problem was the following: I started FF in an ssh -X session and it opened correctly (but slowly because of the distance and number of FW/routers to pass through). However, it crashed with an X message after 2 or 3 clics.
The X message was saying something about synchrization, so the solution is to run “firefox –sync”