Earlier this month, I posted that Firefox would not start for me.  Ed Greshko kindly showed my his output when he started Firefox from the command line.  I noticed a bunch of Gnome stuff and assumed that there was some sort of dependency I was missing, installed Gnome, and it seemed to work.  Ed noted that I was solving a small problem with a big hammer, but to me, if installing gnome (a one-command fix) worked, then I didn't really care what the problem was as long as it was fixed.

Well, Ed was right in his criticism.  The problem popped up again in a few days.  I now know the problem, and I know a workaround, but I don't know the fix.  Here it is:

Firefox will only allow one invocation of itself on my machine.  Sometimes, if I invoke the program by clicking an icon, it will come up with an error message that says you can only have one copy running.  However, sometimes that message does not appear, and it simply dies silently.  Moreover, I don't remember ever getting that error message when I run it from command line, and I'm a very terminal-oriented guy.

But that's OK.  The *problem* is that if I kill firefox by clicking on the kill-window button rather than the Quit button, the window goes away, but firefox continues in the background.  Thus, if I kill firefox by closing the window, I can't start it again without running ps, finding the process, and manually killing it.  It's an easy workaround, but a minor inconvenience.

Worse, however, if I forget to do that and log out, appearently the next time I turn on KDE, it comes on as a background process but never shows a window.  Once again, that's not a huge problem now that I know to look for it.

I still don't know the fix, but the workaround is easy.

So, installing Gnome "fixed" the problem because I ended up cleanly exiting and restarting the machine, not because of anything Gnome did.

Sigh.

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