Ok, if Thunderbird is running and you try and start Firebird, the MozillaFirebird script thinks that Firebird is already running and tries to open a new window/tab. It can't and so produces "Unable to send command to running Mozilla Firebird instance". I think this is actually a problem with mozilla-xremote-client. Anyway, I bodged around this by not checking for the return value and just loading a new Firebird if mozilla-xremote-client failed. There are other problems though which may be symptoms of the bodge...I'm still working on this and will report on any findings...
*** Bug 40180 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
There is also a problem involving &s in urls, which I created a bug for but then couldn't remember the instances in which it was a problem and cancelled. Anyway, running something like: MozillaFirebird "http://www.gentoo.org/index.html&testing&this&problem" When Firebird isn't running causes the script to go south since it can't form the arg array properly with declare -a, and produces a syntax error. This isn't a problem with opening a new window/tab since it defaults to $1. When opening a new Firebird, however, the arg array is used, and since this hasn't been created properly you just get an empty window. I'm working on a way to fix this, but don't hold your breath since I'm not much of a script expert.
Oh, just noticed the Thunderbird/Firebird problem has been fixed (but no new ebuild...people might not notice this..) but the & problem still stands....
Created attachment 24827 [details] Bodgified MozillaFirebird script Bodged version of script which replaces any ampersands (&) in the arguments/url before the arguments/url are processed and then puts them back in
Please see if this issue persists in the most recent revisions of the MozillaFirebird launch script. Copy it from /usr/portage/net-www/mozilla-fire{bird,fox}/files/{MozillaFirebird,firefox} into /usr/bin and make sure it's executable.
New script tests out ok....however, at the time of testing the firefox script needed a little alteration since it changes from using ffpath to fbpath and this causes problems...Other than that its fine.
Good, closing this one down (fbpath also fixed)
