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Marcus
Asked: 2020-04-06 10:21:23 +0800 CST

Why does Thunderbird cause an error when launching Firefox, if it's already running?

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I have Thunderbird (v52.9.1) setup to launch Firefox on http(s) links.

Specifically, it's setup to run a script that contains (besides the shebang):

firefox --profile /path/to/profile --private-window "$@"

The problem is that if Firefox is already running, and I open an http(s) link in Thunderbird, I get the error:

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.

What puzzles me is that if I execute the same script via terminal, or desktop environment, Firefox is opened without any issue (even if there is another one running).

Why does this happen?

thunderbird firefox

1 Answers

  1. Thunderbird sets a lot of environment variables (this bug may be related), which will change Firefox behavior. It's not clear if this is intended or not.

    The solution is to find an unset them all; the list I've found in my case, with related unsets, is:

    unset MOZ_APP_LAUNCHER
unset MOZ_ASSUME_USER_NS
unset MOZ_CRASHREPORTER_DATA_DIRECTORY
unset MOZ_CRASHREPORTER_EVENTS_DIRECTORY
unset MOZ_CRASHREPORTER_RESTART_ARG_0
unset MOZ_CRASHREPORTER_RESTART_ARG_1
unset MOZ_CRASHREPORTER_RESTART_ARG_2
unset MOZ_LAUNCHED_CHILD
unset MOZ_NEW_INSTANCE
unset NO_AT_BRIDGE
unset NO_EM_RESTART
unset XRE_BINARY_PATH
unset XRE_PROFILE_LOCAL_PATH
unset XRE_PROFILE_NAME
unset XRE_PROFILE_PATH
unset XRE_START_OFFLINE
unset XUL_APP_FILE
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