Dual monitors, separate X displays; want firefox in both displays

bforbes · 03-11-2008, 05:15 AM

I have two monitors hooked up to my nvidia card. I'm running the proprietary nvidia driver, set up so that I have one X display for each monitor.
The problem is, I can only use Firefox in one display/monitor at once. If I try to open it in both displays, I get that familiar message:

Quote:

Firefox is already running, but is not responding. To open a new window, you must first close the existing Firefox process, or restart your system.

I can, however, use the DISPLAY specifier to open a firefox window in the display that already has firefox in it:

Code:

DISPLAY=:0.0 firefox

But this is not what I want. It seems like firefox gets locked into one display. How can I fix this? I don't want to run another instance of firefox as another user. I also can't run TwinView with the combination of monitors that I have.

jschiwal · 03-11-2008, 06:41 AM

Try the "-nolocal" option as well. I will use this to run firefox on a remote computer "via ssh -X". If I don't firefox will open on the local screen as expected but be running on the local machine rather than the remote. Maybe this will work for multiple screens as well.

bforbes · 03-11-2008, 06:56 AM

That didn't seem to work. I had a look at the firefox man page and tried a few other options that looked promising, but they didn't work either. Do you have any other ideas?

jschiwal · 03-11-2008, 07:01 AM

You could create a different profile for that screen.

bforbes · 03-11-2008, 07:06 AM

I found this thread which is the same problem: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=189598

But the solution was to run a different profile on each display. I'd prefer to run the same instance, with the same bookmarks and settings, but I'm willing to compromise. I could use a script to copy bookmarks over to the alternate profile every so often.

I want to get to the bottom of this though. What I'm thinking is that the part of Firefox that creates new windows only has the capability of using one X display per instance. In that case, I'd have to delve into the source code, which would be a hassle.

jschiwal · 03-11-2008, 07:15 AM

I think it has to do with the wrapper program "firefox" rather than the "firefox-bin" program.

Valacosa · 04-17-2008, 12:05 AM

I'm running into the exact same issue - nVidia card with binary driver, and I want Firefox in both displays. Did anyone find a fix?

VonMagnum · 10-15-2008, 09:26 PM

This seems to be one of those situations where people know about the problem, but their attitude is run TwinView or something when it doesn't work for squat with some programs. I prefer dual screen mode, but while Konqueror runs fine on both monitors, Firefox complains about it already running. I find it amazing that a lesser browser can do something Firefox can't. The problem is the Firefox team apparently couldn't care less for the same reasons. They'd rather just tell you to use TwinView than fix the darn problem so it'll run on both displays like it darn well SHOULD.