Mozilla Firefox has done some good to the Web as a whole. I still wonder why, for $DEITY’s sake, it does everything different from a normal application. To be precise, Firefox sucks just a little too much for my taste.
Today’s gripe: I have two machines here, my laptop and my
workstation. The workstation is headless due to a broken monitor,
but it’s connected to the stereo. My music collection is served by
libapache2-mod-musicindex over HTTP, and I have not
yet figured out how to configure mocp to actually play
remote playlists (any ideas?). Thus, these days I X-forward Firefox
to my laptop to surf the list and select the songs.
But try this: start Firefox locally, then start an instance through an X-enabled SSH session: it will open a new window of the running local session, which is really not what I want nor expect. It seems like the requirement to surf from somewhere else is an out of bounds concept for the Firefox developers.
Thanks for trying (and failing) to be smart, Mr. Firefox. Why don’t you rather concentrate on processing clicks and keystrokes when you should, rather than ignoring them from time to time?
Update: Matt Brubeck tells me that
MOZ_NO_REMOTE=1 in the environment does what I want.
Future versions will have a -no-remote command-line
argument. I think it should become default. Please see #352809 if you have an opinion
on this.
PS: Firefox and OpenOffice.org seem to be two flagship products of the F/OSS world. At the same time, they are probably the two best examples of programmes orthogonal to the Unix philosophy. Does that mean that the Unix philosophy is the wrong way? Holy Shit!
