Tuesday, July 27, 2004

Opening email links with Mozilla

Mozilla under Linux has a bug that has been driving me crazy. When I have my browser running, and try to open a URL link from an email message, I get a dialog box from Mozilla asking me to choose a profile to use. When I choose one, it throws an error that the profile is already in use, and I cannot load the browser. I found that this is due to a session locking feature in Mozilla. There's a lock file you can delete to allow the browser to run, but it'll only run once, as the lock file is recreated when you open the browser the second time.

This has been quite annoying, as it means I either can't open URL's from email messages, OR I must close my browser completely before attempting to click on an email URL. And that sucks!

In my research, I finally found a couple workarounds involving scripts that check and see if mozilla is already running, and if so, just open the URL in a new window in the current session. If it's not already running, it just opens normally.

Check out this link on linuxquestions.org - there are several scripts. I got smither's script to work fine under Mozilla 1.7 and Mandrake 10.

Mozilla thread at linuxquestions.org

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