Running Firefox on Dual Head Monitors

Rai    Linux, Tips    

I have been using Firefox way back during my college days and if my memory serves me right, I started using it since year 1999 or 2000. It has saved me from a lot of headaches from then on and sometimes, even caused some. There were times that not all sites are Firefox friendly and so I have to open an Internet Explorer session just to get a glimpse of the web page. Then things started to change. More and more websites are becoming Firefox-ready and so the Firefox era has boomed.

I use Firefox on my work and home computers, on Linux and on Windows, on KDE or on GNOME. I never really had a hard time tweaking Firefox since a lot of information is already circulating the net and most of all, it is open source and free. Firefox is not really that hard.

What? Prove my point? Well, OK.

Let’s say you want to know your Firefox version (which you can do so by opening the Help menu, but that is too easy). Please stop googling. Give up? Well, it is as simple as opening a new tab and typing about in the address bar. That will display some information about your Firefox.

If you want to know all the settings you use on your Firefox, you can type about:config in the address bar to bring up the list of configurations that you can edit yourself to your satisfaction. The list contains some of the settings that are not accessible in the Options menu and adjusting these settings may make or break your Firefox so be very careful.

Lately I have been bugged by a Firefox problem. A problem so simple that it beats the hell out of me. You see, I use dual-head monitor settings using Individual Desktop in my workstation. I know I posted a picture of my workstation here so you use the search bar to look for it . Anyway, when I start Firefox on the one monitor, Firefox will not open on the other simply because, Firefox is already running (duh). And I can’t drag another Firefox window to the other monitor because I’m using Individual Desktop settings which basically means each monitor is independent of each other, as opposed to the Spanning Desktop setting which is one whole desktop, cut in half for each monitor to share. So what do I do now?

You might say, “Why not use spanning mode?”. It’s because I don’t like cluttered taskbars and I don’t want to hide taskbars either. I want them where I could see them. And using spanning desktop makes me feel like the taskbar is cluttered. With individual desktop however, I get to control which window will open on what desktop.

Now, with all that out of the way, let’s get back to the problem of opening two sessions of Firefox on two separate desktop session. Well one way is opening the other Firefox using the commandline. Just type the following lines on your terminal window:

$ /path/to/firefox &

That will call up a different session of Firefox and the & brings the command into background. This worked for me until yesterday. When I opened up another session of Firefox, it still gives me the “Firefox is already running” error. So what do I do now?

After much googling, I found a tweak that will open up a the Profiles manager window so I could set a different profile. In the commandline, type:

$ /path/to/firefox –profilemanager

Profile manager will open so you could set a different profile to use. This worked but I don’t really want to use or create another profile. So what now?

Type the following in the commandline:

$ /path/to/firefox -no-remote

And voila! There’s my Firefox. The -no-remote switch makes you run Firefox using the same profile. You can also do:

$ /path/to/firefox -P linux-stuff -no-remote

if you want to use the linux-stuff profile in two different sessions.

That’s the gist of it. There are more Firefox tips and tricks if you know where to find them . And of course if want to ask something about Firefox or any other Linux related questions, I might be of help. Just send an email to kamotegirl@pinoytux.com and be sure to ask nicely! 

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