Starting a second copy of Pale Moon

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Trinoc
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Starting a second copy of Pale Moon

Unread post by Trinoc » 2014-10-14, 11:00

I currently run Palemoon Portable 24.7.2 which I keep resident in the system tray almost all of the time. I'd like to test Palemoon Portable 25 without having to close 24.7.2 every time I start it up. For example, I want to go through all of my add-ons in PM25 to check which ones have problems, while keeping Palemoon forum and add-on pages open in PM24 to cross-reference what I find.

I don't want to change either PM24 or PM25 to allow multiple instances of each to load, but it would be good if one copy of each could be loaded without interfering with each other.

Is there any way I can temporarily give PM25 a new name? Could I (for example) change Palemoon-Portable.exe to Palemoon-Portable-25.exe and Palemoon.exe to Palemoon-25.exe, and change something in Palemoon-Portable.ini so that it runs PM25 rather than recognising that Palemoon.exe (v24) is already running and linking to that instead?

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Re: How do i turn off Palemoon logo at start?

Unread post by Moonchild » 2014-10-14, 11:05

Trinoc wrote:Is there any way I can temporarily give PM25 a new name? Could I (for example) change Palemoon-Portable.exe to Palemoon-Portable-25.exe and Palemoon.exe to Palemoon-25.exe, and change something in Palemoon-Portable.ini so that it runs PM25 rather than recognising that Palemoon.exe (v24) is already running and linking to that instead?
In the palemoon-portable.ini, uncomment the "moz-no-remote" line. That will allow the portable to start when you already have a desktop version open.
"Sometimes, the best way to get what you want is to be a good person." -- Louis Rossmann
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Trinoc
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Re: How do i turn off Palemoon logo at start?

Unread post by Trinoc » 2014-10-14, 11:17

Moonchild wrote:In the palemoon-portable.ini, uncomment the "moz-no-remote" line. That will allow the portable to start when you already have a desktop version open.
That's not quite what I want to do (as I think I said but maybe not too clearly). I want a maximum of a single instance of PM24 and a single instance of PM25 to be able to run at once, but I want the system to recognise PM24 and PM25 as different applications (rather like if I was running Palemoon and Firefox at the same time).

For example, I have the registry set up so that http links in emails are directed to PM portable 24, either loading PM24 if it is not already loaded, or passing the url to it if it is already resident. At the moment, if it happens that PM25 is loaded and PM24 is not, the url will (I think) be passed to PM25 rather than loading PM24.

How does an application recognise that it is already running to avoid loading a new copy? I assumed it was either the app name itself (e.g. palemoon.exe) or the GUID. Since you have changed the GUID in PM25 it is clearly not that, so I guessed that by simply changing the app name (e.g. to palemoon-25.exe) it would be recognised as a different app. Maybe I've got this completely wrong -- if so, please correct me -- but if I'm right I would need to know how to tell palemoon-portable.exe to load the app with the new name.

Edit #1: I just changed Palemoon-Portable.exe to Palemoon-Portable-25.exe, changed Palemoon directory to Palemoon-25 and palemoon.exe to palemoon-25.exe. Then in user.ini I changed AppName to Palemoon-25. This loads palemoon-25.exe correctly when PM24 is not already in memory, but if PM24 is already loaded it just opens a new PM24 window. I have now set MOZ_NO_REMOTE=1 in PM25 but not in PM24 (where I don't want it) and it seems to work OK when I have PM24 loaded first (I haven't tried loading PM25 first yet since I am using PM24 to type this post).

I see I also need to rename user\palemoon directory as user\palemoon-25 to get it to use my existing profile.

I haven't used it extensively to see whether there are any more gotchas yet.

Edit #2: With hindsight I think I should have left AppName unchanged at "Palemoon" and just changed PathToExe instead, leaving the directory names unchanged.

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Re: Starting a second copy of Pale Moon

Unread post by Moonchild » 2014-10-19, 07:33

What you are trying to do is not exactly possible, so you have to keep an eye on not opening a second copy of the one with "no remote" enabled (since it will not check for "already running". You cannot prevent a no-remote copy from restricting itself to exactly one copy.

To explain: Pale Moon checks if it is already running by window handle. This is the same regarless of your flavor, version, GUID, exe name or location. So, unless this is changed (at compile time), all copies of Pale Moon, when running, will recognize other copies when they are running and divert a new window to that instance.
"Sometimes, the best way to get what you want is to be a good person." -- Louis Rossmann
"Seek wisdom, not knowledge. Knowledge is of the past; wisdom is of the future." -- Native American proverb
"Linux makes everything difficult." -- Lyceus Anubite

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