On X11, when running firefox -p foo http://mozilla.org, and a window for another
profile is already open, the -p argument is ignored and a new tab or window is
opened in the unrelated session.
Previously, the equivalent firefox -p foo -remote openurl(http://mozilla.org)
would see that there is no window for the profile foo, complain about it, and
abort. If a window for the profile foo was open, however, a new tab or windows
would open in that session.
Here, we modify the behaviour such that firefox -p foo http://mozilla.org never
ignores the -p argument, and does the sensible thing depending on the context:
- if a window is already open for the profile, use that session.
- otherwise, open a new window for that profile.
When no -p argument is given, the behaviour is unchanged.
As RemoteCommandLine, which first attempts to open a connection with an existing
firefox, falls through when there is no existing firefox, the -p argument must be
kept in the command line. It turns out CheckArg didn't handle the case properly,
so fix this as well.
The changes in RemoteCommandLine otherwise match what used to be in
HandleRemoteArgument before bug 1080319.
The -remote option has existed essentially forever, but its usefulness is
questionable:
- It requires a running instance to be any useful, so any script actually
using it should first do -remote 'ping()' and handle the response properly.
- It is not cross-application. The remote service dispatches the -remote
commands to the command line handler, and, for example, desktop b2g builds
don't have handlers for -remote (although thunderbird and seamonkey do).
- It is not a cross-platform option, which leads to the following point:
- There are other command line ways to do the same thing (at least in
Firefox), without having to jump through hoops with -remote 'ping()',
because there are command line options to do those same things on non-X11
platforms.
For the latter, in Firefox case:
- -remote 'openURL(url)' can be replaced with firefox url
- -remote 'openURL(url,new-tab)' can be replaced with firefox -new-tab url
- -remote 'openURL(url,new-window)' can be replaced with firefox -new-window
url
- -remote 'openfile(file,...)' is the same as -remote 'openurl(file,...) so,
can be replaced as above
- -remote 'xfedocommand(openbrowser)' is inherited from the mozilla suite and
doesn't make much sense, but can be replaced with firefox -new-window
The interesting part is that without changing nsBrowserContentHandler.js,
-remote still works, meaning that if people really feel strongly about
-remote, they'll still be able to write an addon to bring it back. This also
means this patch actually doesn't remove -remote for applications other than
Firefox that do support it, although -remote 'ping()' doesn't work as
expected. However, other -remote commands will now work even without a
running instance.
Otherwise our stack is misaligned by the time we return from this.
This misalignment doesn't cause a crash with the Winodws thread
startup code, but it does with ASAN because it does many things
after the thread entry point exits.
