On Fri, 24 Aug 2007, Tim Green wrote:
On 8/23/07, Ted Harding ted.harding@nessie.mcc.ac.uk wrote:
I telnetted through to another of my 3 machines (built in 2001) and started up an old Mozilla on it (from about the same era). Lo and Behold! I got a window spawned from the firefox on my laptop!!! No window from the Mozilla on the other machine.
Did you check your DISPLAY setting? Mozilla/Firefox checks if it is already running on the current display and prods it to just open another window.
And when it checks if it's already running, it checks under an application ID determined by the -a option given on the command line. So if you don't like this behaviour, you can suppress it by running the browser as
firefox -a somerubbishynamethatnoapplicationcouldhave
(Thanks are due to Chris Richardson for helping me figure that out, a few weeks back.)
The fact that this happens at all, though, means that an x client running on machine A can tell an x client running on machine B to open a new tab/window pointing at a URL chosen by the client on machine A - even though the x server may be on A or B, or indeed on a third machine C. Does anyone have a view as to the security implications of this?