Bug#612304: How many new profiles

[Thomas Thorne]

> The problem is that using different profiles is not really what most
people would expect, so doing that automatically is confusing.

I can see that it would be confusing and asking for a bug of "my left screen has the correct homepage but when I load on my right screen it goes to a page about iceweasel".  I guess it is a fundamental part of the firefox system that only one instance of it can connect to a profile and that all the many window or tabs are really just that one instance.  Only when you have it on a separate X display it must be a different instance as there is no way of running the windowing system across them (unless KDE does it but I am not desperate enough to start using that yet).  

The problem is that when I don't use separate profiles I get the same message about "already running...".  I guess I have work around for now and I can accept that from the iceweasel end at least there is nothing that can be really done to improve my situation without confusing others.  

> Anyways, I thought these zaphod type setups were being deprecated?

I am not sure there are many options if you want to render OpenGL to multiple displays unless you can communicate from your windowing engine into the OpenGL system in such a way that you can construct a separate viewpoint for each head and then assign each viewpoint to a full screen on each display.  

What I wanted to use it for was to have independent multiple desktops on each head so that I can keep two or three task going and visible without having to clear what is in my main display.  If there is a way to do that without the zaphod system then I am happy enough but with machines getting more powerful, graphics cards supporting more outputs and displays getting cheaper I would think that more people would be using them in a variety of ways.  

-----Original Message-----
From: Mike Hommey [mailto:mh at glandium.org] 
Sent: 08 February 2011 08:41
To: Thomas Thorne; 612304 at bugs.debian.org
Subject: Re: Bug#612304: How many new profiles

On Tue, Feb 08, 2011 at 08:26:08AM +0000, Thomas Thorne wrote:
> This means that the -display option is ineffective on it's own, but no mention is made of using -no-remote in the man page.
> 
> It also seems that I cannot have two window instances using the same profile, even if they are on the same screen, using the -no-profile option.  What seems to work well for me is to run without the -no-remote option but to create a profile for each of my displays.
> 
> To run on display 1 with profile one:
>  iceweasel --display=:0.0 -P one &
> To run on display 2 with profile two:
> iceweasel --display=:0.1 -P two &
> 
> Thank you for helping me resolve this behaviour, it is a little suppressing considering the usage stated in the man page:
> USAGE
>        iceweasel  is a simple shell script that will set up the environment for the actual executable, firefox-bin.  If there is an Iceweasel browser already running, iceweasel will arrange for it to create a new browser  window;  otherwise  it  will start the Iceweasel application.
> 
> If the script can tell that it is running on an X11 system and that there are multiple displays, why does it not just spawn a new default profile for the user for each display?  Something like "icweasel -display=$DISPLAY -P $DISPLAY" should work repeatedly for both the Seperate X Screen system I run and in a TwinView system it should see no change as $DISPLAY would always be the same thing.  Perhaps if keeping the "default" profile as the default catching when $DISPLAY==:0.0 would work in the majority of cases?
> I am not very good with shell scripts so I am unsure how to translate my suggestion above into a patch file but I will think about it over the next couple of days if you think it would be worthwhile?

The problem is that using different profiles is not really what most
people would expect, so doing that automatically is confusing.

Anyways, I thought these zaphod type setups were being deprecated?

Mike