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Prevent Remote Firefox Reuse

If you do a lot of work with ssh and X11 forwarding, you probably have seen this problem. You have firefox running on your primary system. You have logged in to a remote system and have X11 forwarding enabled so it is sharing your primary X display. Usually this is fantastic, remotely launched programs with GUIs display on your primary display. Howver, firefox by default detects an existing firefox instance on the display and opens the URL there.

Usually I want the firefox instance to be running on the remote machine so that if I download a file it is saved on the remote machine. The trick to make this happen is the -no-remote command-line option:

firefox -no-remote

Then firefox will launch a new instance on the remote machine, just like we want. Downloaded files are saved on the remote machine.

Last modified on 5 Nov 2007 by AO