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by satya71 2064 days ago
It does. `firefox -no-remote -P <profile>`
2 comments

There's also a firefox-bin. Anyone know what the difference between firefox and firefox-bin is nowadays?

I believe that in the far past firefox-bin was the firefox binary, and firefox was a shell script that would do things like notice you already have a firefox-bin instance open and signal it to open a new window rather than launching a new firefox-bin instance.

But nowadays, firefox and firefox-bin seem almost the same. On the current release version on Mac, for example, both are binaries, with firefox-bin 40320 bytes and firefox just 16 bytes bigger.

Info.plist in /Applications/Firefox.app/Contents gives firefox is the executable to run. I'm not sure what role firefox-bin has now, if any.

Grabbing the source and building it myself results in firefox and firefox-bin matching.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=658850 has some background, it seems at least sometimes they are identical
I used to always include `--no-remote` here but it seems `firefox -P <profile>` now works, too, even when another Firefox instance is already running. Is anyone experiencing the same?
When I last tested, it varied by platform.

Linux was happy to open a new instance without the `--new-instance` option (which is implied by `--no-remote`), but macOS required it.