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I have a roaming profile set up for myself on my network (via Group Policy based redirection of My Docs and Desktop). Sometimes, I need to access a remote computer via RDC with the same credentials I am logged on to my local computer with, so I effectively have my own profile open twice on two computers.

I've noticed two peculiar (and frustrating!) outcomes of this:

  1. Firefox always asks to check my add-ons are compatible with the current version of FF when I go to a different workstation
  2. When I try to open Firefox simultaneously on the local and remote machine I get the message "Firefox is already open but not responding".

Any way to avoid this?

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  • Do you have the same version of Firefox on both computers?
    – Jeff F.
    Apr 30, 2012 at 19:44
  • No. Would installing the same version solve the problem? Apr 30, 2012 at 20:51
  • 1
    You should not do this. You will trash your Firefox profile. Firefox was not designed to handle multiple different processes changing things in the profile at the same time. If you were able to get this open, then you basically just have a race condition where you will lose data, and the data that gets lost will depend on which instance of Firefox exists last. For example, if you added a bookmark on the two instances, the bookmark that would actually be stored after both were closed, would be from the instance that closed last.
    – Zoredache
    May 1, 2012 at 0:18

1 Answer 1

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First Update to the same version on both sides. This should fix issue 1.

Second When you open Firefox it creates a Parent.lock in the sub folder of "%APPDATA%\Mozilla\Profiles" this is what causes that message. It can't be deleted while Firefox is open easily.

I don't know if your second request is plausible, if someone else knows a way let me know, so I'd recommend Multiple profiles:

Modify your firefox shortcut to be:

"...\firefox.exe" -p -no-remote  

This will allow you to open a second profile which you could name Remote, for instance and have the two separate profiles open on each computer.

As far as I know Firefox will not let you open the same profile twice as this could cause some major corruption.

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  • You can get it to work by using a tool to force the deletion of the Parent.lock, but you will trash the Firefox profile. If you don't care about losing things, you could just have a batch file that made a copy of your profile to a different directory.
    – Zoredache
    May 1, 2012 at 0:22
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    Actually the way to run an additional instance of Firefox with a different profile is "...\firefox.exe" -P "2nd Profile" -no-remote - see Opening a new instance of your Mozilla application with another profile, However I tend to agree with @Zoredache that having two instances simultaneously using the same profile is unlikely to work.
    – martineau
    May 1, 2012 at 2:15

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