A lot of people have been experiencing problems with the -remote command for Mozilla applications (Firebird in this case). This problem is caused because the ebuild does not set MOZ_ENABLE_XREMOTE. It can be easily corrected by adding this to the ebuild: export MOZ_ENABLE_XREMOTE=1. This will save a lot of people headache's :) Also, for the devs that are interested, take a look at this page: http://lxr.mozilla.org/seamonkey/source/xpfe/bootstrap/nsAppRunner.cpp#1662, for other things you might want to set/not set. Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. 2. 3.
I think this is fixed these days in firefox, etc. Please re-open if it's still a problem.