I am having a strange problem when I start more than one instance of Mozilla 1.0. If I have a mozilla instance running and try to start(by clicking icon or from command line) another instance the Profile Manager starts. I have only a default profile in my .mozilla directory. If I select this profile and click on start mozilla I get an error saying "Mozilla cannot use profile default as it is in use....." and I cannot start the second instance of mozilla.

However if I do Ctrl-N I can open another Mozilla window or Ctrl-T to open another tab.

Some background on this. It all started when I upgraded to Mozilla 1.0. I have Suse 8.0 , where mozilla 0.9.8-suse is installed by default at /opt/mozilla. I installed Mozilla 1.0 using the mozilla-installer this directory. I followed the install instructions given in the mozilla.org release note.

I have tried deleting my profile and even deleting the .mozilla directory, but the problem keeps dogging me. I have tried google and mozilla.org but I could not find any information on it.

I hope some one can help me on this one.

Thanks,
Manas

I'm pretty sure that you are not supposed to create more than once instance of mozilla, or galeon, or netscape by clicking on the icon or through the command line. You should do what you said, ctrl-n or create tabs.

Ctrl-n should get you up a new window. Those browsers are not like IE where you can continue to click on the desktop for a new window.

Is it a feature of Mozilla 1.0+ that more than one instance of mozilla is not allowed to run ? I only saw this behavior starting with mozilla 1.0 rc1 or rc2. Prior to it you could start multiple instances.

Only reason I can think of why this is a feature because if Ctrl-N or Ctrl-T spawns another thread then it is much less expensive then starting another process. I could not find anything on this in the mozilla release notes.

Thanks.

This is a work around for profile corruption issues that exists in mozilla.

One other problem could be if you didn't uninstall the 0.98 mozilla RPM. There could be a conflict there. You could try to remove the RPM and see what happens.

I have tried to start-up mozilla from the icon twice now and both have loaded ok, no problems, so I stand corrected for my first answer.

I get around this by using the following command when I already have a mozilla window open:

mozilla -remote "openURL(,new-window)"

It isn't a fix for the problem, but it is a workaround that I have found to work well enough.

--CJD

Ahem I say it again This is a work around for profile corruption issues that exists in mozilla. ;-P

I uninstalled the Mozilla 1.0 that I got from mozilla.org and installed the Mozilla-1.0-Suse build and the profile problem was not there.
I guess this is not a Mozilla bug, but may be a distro related isssue, becasue I did not see the same problem on my laptop which runs Mandrake.

Inspite of some small problems , mozilla rocks :-)
- Manas

You might want to try building the 1.1 beta of Mozilla. It's quite nice. I do see that they only seem to have RedHat 7.x RPMs available, so maybe using their installer is a good idea.

Just make another profile when the dialogue screen comes up. Right now it runs as default user. Use any name for a new profile. I have only seen that when trying to run two instances of Moz. With all the tabs there really isn't a reason that I can think of to run more than one. I've had 23 tabs open at once. Get the build that ends in -sea.tar.gz

Thank you cjdet! This fixed this bothersome problem I've been having.

Whew..

I was having the same problem when aMSN tried to open a netscape instance for me to check my email. it is really annoying to get the "cannot use profile" message. i'm so glad i found this answer! thanks!

here's more info about that command (a year later =)

http://wp.netscape.com/newsref/std/x-remote.html

Yes, thanks cjdet. I launch firebird (based on mozilla) with a keyboard shortcut (WindowMaker). Created another shortcut for when I've got an instance already opened.

This is one of the worst 'features' of mozilla and it's too bad it has been carried over into firebird. Not such a big deal for windows users who only have one desktop, but if you're on a different desktop from the one the browser is open on it shouldn't be a big deal to just launch another instance.

I wonder if there's a compile option to turn the behaviour off. From other posts in this thread it seems that some versions for some distros don't suffer from it. I don't know if any distros are doing firebird yet though.

There is a patch out there (Mandrake includes it by default in their RPMs) which causes Mozilla to always open a new thread if an existing process is started. This works fine and dandy for most situations, but what if you want to log into a cookie based website twice with different users? This is impossible because the damn session cookie is shared among all threads in the process. So for example if you want to log into phpMyAdmin twice you have to use two seperate profiles or two different web browsers. I really wish Mozilla and crew would pull their head out of their you know what and fix such an obvious issue. There is no earthly reason they can't share the profile among multiple processes. It's not like mozilla is continuously writing to that file anyway, it should only acquire a lock when it is actually reading or writing from the file not for the entire duration of the process. Imagine if your database server only allowed one process to communicate with it, how useful do you think that database would be?

Thanks jsjohnst, I'll go looking for it if it makes me crazy, though for now having a second hotkey combo seems to be doing the trick.

As for having different profiles, I suppose simply selecting a new profile from a menu was too obvious. I wouldn't be likely to use it, but I can see how some would find multiple profiles useful. But you're right, very poorly implemented as is.