Open URL in an already open Firefox profile

Question

I have several Firefox profiles that constantly open on my Mac (I run Snow Leopard) and I need a command that opens a new tab in one of them. I tried options on this:

firefox -P targetProfileName -remote "openurl (http://example.com, new-tab)"

but he continues to complain that "A copy of Firefox is already open. Only one copy of Firefox can be opened at a time." I know that it is already open; I need a new tab in a window that already exists. Any idea how to do this? Thank you in advance!

Answer 1

Try open -a Firefox 'http://example.com/' . This opens the given URL with Firefox, starting with it if it is not already running.

If you skip the -a Firefox part of -a Firefox , then the URL will be opened using the default browser.

Answer 2

If you already have Mozilla Firefox open with a default profile or another profile, try:

 Path-To/firefox -remote openurl("http://www.example.org") 

Tested and worked for me with Mozilla Firefox from 2.x to 12.x

Answer 3

I'm not sure how remote access works on a Mac, since I don't have one, but on Windows and Linux you can only enable one profile for remote access; you need to run this profile in normal mode, as well as all other profiles using -no-remote .

Answer 4

I don’t have enough reputation yet to comment on the answers, so I will post my answers here.

Neil, I can reproduce the behavior that you describe on my Linux box, but not on my Mac. I even tried to close all my Firefox profiles by opening only one, and try to remotely open a tab in this; I am still getting this error.

maxelost, this is a possible workaround. It opens a tab in the first profile that I opened, so if I necessarily open the profiles in a certain order, this is an option.

The workaround I'm leaning toward right now is to create a separate profile that is used only by the application from which I want to open new tabs. In this case, I need to make sure that I open only one tab at a time, and I remember to close this Firefox profile when I finished.

Answer 5

I had the same problem as your developing my webpage using firefox 17.0 +.

Since the profile page is already open, you do not need the -remote option.

I tried to use it like firefox -P webpage -no-remote 'openurl(%p)'

Where% p is the argument.

What worked for me was to open in an existing open profile:

firefox -P webpage -new-tab '% p%