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, low power server, 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” 🙂
[…] Luckily, the solution is fairly straightforward. Once you have SSH’d into a remote host (using ssh -X), you simply need to run firefox -no-remote. Of course you may want to tack on > /dev/null and an ampersand & to ignore the output and background the task. (Thanks to The Open Sourcer.) […]
Thanks! This has been plaguing me for years and somehow I was too lazy too actually google until tonight. I always either used lynx or galeon.
Thanks.
[…] Quelle: theopensourcerer.com […]
[…] http://www.theopensourcerer.com/2007/11/15/remote-firefox-over-xssh/ a few seconds ago from Gwibber […]
Still useful in 2010, firefox 3.6 …
Thanks!
Thanks 🙂
Thanks a lot!! Great work and allows me to do some simple testing!
Thanks!
This feature is in any case totally insane. Why would anybody want to open a local FF from a remote shell???
Hopefully good for me, I want to trigger firefox on a remote machine via ssh and login to a specific site. Is there any other way to do this?
Thanks from another ssh enthusiast! This was driving me nuts…
Thanks! Very helpful!
Thanks, It was really driving me crazy!!!!
firefox -no-remote &
Works fine! Thank you!
I confirm
( export MOZ_NO_REMOTE=1; firefox -profilemanager )is still working!!!Thanks! Just log into the remote machine, and enter the command above, it will prompt to ask you to create a profile. Just click okay and wait a few seconds for it to load!
Johns line still works.