Earlier this month, I posted that Firefox would not start for me.  Ed Greshko 
kindly showed my his output when he started Firefox from the command line.  I 
noticed a bunch of Gnome stuff and assumed that there was some sort of 
dependency I was missing, installed Gnome, and it seemed to work.  Ed noted 
that I was solving a small problem with a big hammer, but to me, if installing 
gnome (a one-command fix) worked, then I didn't really care what the problem 
was as long as it was fixed.

Well, Ed was right in his criticism.  The problem popped up again in a few 
days.  I now know the problem, and I know a workaround, but I don't know the 
fix.  Here it is:

Firefox will only allow one invocation of itself on my machine.  Sometimes, if 
I invoke the program by clicking an icon, it will come up with an error message 
that says you can only have one copy running.  However, sometimes that message 
does not appear, and it simply dies silently.  Moreover, I don't remember ever 
getting that error message when I run it from command line, and I'm a very 
terminal-oriented guy.

But that's OK.  The *problem* is that if I kill firefox by clicking on the 
kill-window button rather than the Quit button, the window goes away, but 
firefox continues in the background.  Thus, if I kill firefox by closing the 
window, I can't start it again without running ps, finding the process, and 
manually killing it.  It's an easy workaround, but a minor inconvenience.

Worse, however, if I forget to do that and log out, appearently the next time I 
turn on KDE, it comes on as a background process but never shows a window.  
Once again, that's not a huge problem now that I know to look for it.

I still don't know the fix, but the workaround is easy.

So, installing Gnome "fixed" the problem because I ended up cleanly exiting and 
restarting the machine, not because of anything Gnome did.

Sigh.


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