Comment 35 for bug 93546

Revision history for this message
In , Rhkramer (rhkramer) wrote :

The bug I reported, Bug 190718, is *not* a duplicate of this bug -- far from it
-- in most respects it seems almost the opposite.

My problem is this: In Mozilla 1.1 (Mandrake 9.0) when any portion of Mozilla
crashes, all my open Mozilla tabs and windows close. (Since it is not untypical
to have 150 tabs open spread across 15 or so Mozilla windows, and some of those
windows may have open "text boxes" for editing TWiki pages, I lose a significant
amount of work and context.)

It seems no matter how I open Mozilla, only one instance is created.

In one of the comments above it is stated that this is how applications in
Windows behave. It is not, at least as of Win95, and if it has changed it is a
change for the worse. The truth is that in Windows there are ways to open new
copies of an application so they are new windows/tabs of the same instance and
there is a way(s) to open an application so a new instance is created.

In Windows (95), if you open a new application window by entering the
application name on the command line, clicking the icon, or clicking on the
start menu entry, you get a new instance of the application that shares nothing
with the previous instance. (Well, that statement may be a little too strong --
it presumably shares the preferences and things like that.) The point is, a new
instance of the program is created, and if some other instance of the program
crashes, this new instance does not crash (unless the crash kills all of Windows).

On the other hand, if you go into an open window or tab of a running instance of
a program and click New (or Open??), you create a new Window or Tab that is part
of the existing instance. If something happens to cause a crash of this new
window, all open windows and tabs that are part of this instance close, but
those that are part of some other instance remain open and functional.

IIUC some other people are pushing for improvements or changes to the single
instance behavior. My bug (RFE) is requesting that there be a means to create
multiple instances.

Is it clear?

If so, I think somebody needs to rewrite some bugs or create some "meta bugs" to
properly collect the votes. (Note that the two behaviors I describe above are
not mutually exclusive -- there should be a means to do both, and at least
knowledgable users should be aware of how to do both.)

I will now basically paste these same comments into bug 190178 and attempt to
reopen it. Please don't close it as a duplicate of this bug again -- perhaps
there is some other bug that it is truly a duplicate of, but it's not this one.

Or, another way of saying what I'm trying to say -- the writeup on this bug
135137
is so confusing, it's hard to tell what it is about. If my bug truly is
a duplicate of this bug, this bug needs to be rewritten (a new "meta bug") very
clearly, and all the comments to this bug (135137) that confuse the issue need
to be discarded.

Randy Kramer