This is mainly an emacs issue, not of firefox. www-client/firefox and www-client/firefox-bin >= 36.0 dropped the command line option "-remote". As a result of this, Emacs' function `browse-url-firefox', which makes firefox open a url, does not work any more. Remember that functions like `org-open-at-piont' rely on "browse-url-firefox", depending on the case. Emacs upstream provides a patch (for 24.5): http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/emacs.git/patch/?id=1b0ebbdb566a8dfa5f45ce121b2c835e9760091f (Thread http://debbugs.gnu.org/cgi/bugreport.cgi?bug=19921 discusses this issue.) The patch (more precisely, its 3rd hunk) seems to apply cleanly to emacs-24.3 and 24.4. But I'm not sure if it's the best fix in the real world. It'd be safer to write a wrapper of /usr/bin/firefox*, but obviously everyone will be reluctant to take the burden, and it may cause future problems... Thanks.
CCing mozilla team. Looks like firefox still accepts the -remote option but ignores it. There is no warning or error message and it exits with successful status: $ firefox --version Mozilla Firefox 36.0 $ firefox -remote "openURL(http://www.gentoo.org/,new-tab)" $ echo $? 0 As for the Emacs fix, commit 1b0ebbdb isn't what I would call a clean patch, because it contains several unrelated changes like reformatting of docstrings. So I tend to apply the patch posted in http://debbugs.gnu.org/cgi/bugreport.cgi?bug=19921#5 instead. @teika: The patch posted in the upstream bug uses --new-tab and --new-window whereas the emacs-24 commit has -new-tab and -new-window. Any idea why this was changed? Both variants seem to work with firefox-31.4.0 (which documents "-") and firefox-36.0 (which documents "--").
Added to patchsets and fixed in emacs-23.4-r13 and emacs-24.4-r4: http://gitweb.gentoo.org/proj/emacs-tools.git/commit/?h=patchsets&id=a46bb508acc1e3fd08a299243d95fffd5faf6c35 (Upstream documentation at https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Command_Line_Options has a single dash for options, so I guess this is the preferred syntax.) There is already an upstream bug for firefox ignoring invalid options: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1123574
(In reply to Ulrich Müller from comment #1) > CCing mozilla team. Looks like firefox still accepts the -remote option but > ignores it. There is no warning or error message and it exits with > successful status: > > $ firefox --version > Mozilla Firefox 36.0 > $ firefox -remote "openURL(http://www.gentoo.org/,new-tab)" > $ echo $? > 0 > > > As for the Emacs fix, commit 1b0ebbdb isn't what I would call a clean patch, > because it contains several unrelated changes like reformatting of > docstrings. So I tend to apply the patch posted in > http://debbugs.gnu.org/cgi/bugreport.cgi?bug=19921#5 instead. > > @teika: The patch posted in the upstream bug uses --new-tab and --new-window > whereas the emacs-24 commit has -new-tab and -new-window. Any idea why this > was changed? Both variants seem to work with firefox-31.4.0 (which documents > "-") and firefox-36.0 (which documents "--"). -remote readded in 36.0.1 which has been committed to the tree.
