Firefox – Fix ‘Already Running but Not Responding’ Error

browserbrowser-tabsdebianfirefoxlinux

This is Debian 9 Stretch speaking, #1 SMP Debian 4.9.110-3+deb9u4 (2018-08-21), with a new, portable installation of Firefox 62.0 run from /opt with

$ which firefox
/opt/firefox/firefox

My problem is that, even though the command

$ firefox

does launch and run a firefox instance, a subsequent command

$ firefox any.kind/of/url

fails with the famous window message

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.

whereas it used to just open a new tab for the provided url in the existing, running session.

The options --new-tab, --new-window or --no-remote do not help. And I have checked according to this post, that

$ echo $MOZ_NO_REMOTE
0

.. which I think should mean that my desired behaviour is the expected behaviour. (Note that it is not clear to me what is the init file they refer to in this post).

As (I-think-)related problems:

  • clicking a link in a .pdf file opened with evince also fails with the same error message.
  • cliking a link in an e-mail viewed in thunderbird also fails with the same error message.

Am I missing anything here?
How do I add a new tab to the running browser session from the command line?
Any way to solve / get around this problem?

Best Answer

Okay, got it. According to this post, the actual value of MOZ_NO_REMOTE environment variable does not matter, only the fact that it is defined or not. So MOZ_NO_REMOTE=0 is suprisingly synonym of MOZ_NO_REMOTE=1.

So after I removed this line

export MOZ_NO_REMOTE=0

that somehow sneaked into my .[bash|zsh]rc files, and checked that

$ echo $MOZ_NO_REMOTE
⠀

I got my good ol' behaviour back :)

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