The -remote option has existed essentially forever, but its usefulness is
questionable:
- It requires a running instance to be any useful, so any script actually
using it should first do -remote 'ping()' and handle the response properly.
- It is not cross-application. The remote service dispatches the -remote
commands to the command line handler, and, for example, desktop b2g builds
don't have handlers for -remote (although thunderbird and seamonkey do).
- It is not a cross-platform option, which leads to the following point:
- There are other command line ways to do the same thing (at least in
Firefox), without having to jump through hoops with -remote 'ping()',
because there are command line options to do those same things on non-X11
platforms.
For the latter, in Firefox case:
- -remote 'openURL(url)' can be replaced with firefox url
- -remote 'openURL(url,new-tab)' can be replaced with firefox -new-tab url
- -remote 'openURL(url,new-window)' can be replaced with firefox -new-window
url
- -remote 'openfile(file,...)' is the same as -remote 'openurl(file,...) so,
can be replaced as above
- -remote 'xfedocommand(openbrowser)' is inherited from the mozilla suite and
doesn't make much sense, but can be replaced with firefox -new-window
The interesting part is that without changing nsBrowserContentHandler.js,
-remote still works, meaning that if people really feel strongly about
-remote, they'll still be able to write an addon to bring it back. This also
means this patch actually doesn't remove -remote for applications other than
Firefox that do support it, although -remote 'ping()' doesn't work as
expected. However, other -remote commands will now work even without a
running instance.
Mike Hommey
Ehsan Akhgari
Gervase Markham
Michael Wu
Miika Jarvinen