On 10 Mar 2006 at 12:09, Eric Dannewitz wrote: > No, if I launch Firefox again, in WINDOWS TASK MANAGER, I see only ONE > Firefox process.
You're right! I didn't test before I posted. Mea culpa. > . . . Did you not read that in my previous post? Yes, and I believe failing to make an important distinction: there is not a 1:1 relationship between Taskbar buttons and application instances. In WinXP, there isn't even a 1:1 between buttons and windows (if you've got the default Taskbar settings). > I do see multiple windows, but I see only one task running. Taskbar buttons do not represent multiple instances of the APPLICATION. They represent multiple WINDOWS, which can all have the same parent application in TASK MANAGER, or not, depending on the way the application is engineered. As to multiple instances of Firefox and Thunderbird, the reason why the Mozilla has implemented their apps this way is precisely the same as the reason I gave for my own email client, Pegasus Mail, not implementing multiple instances -- because of the problems with sharing user profiles between more than one instance of the app. The Mozilla project has a page describing this problem here: http://www.mozilla.org/projects/embedding/shared_profiles.html But you *can* set up both Firefox and Thunderbird to run multiple instances with different profiles. That's explained here (all on one line, of course): http://www.wynia.org/wordpress/2005/12/08/multiple-instances-of- mozilla-thunderbird-or-firefox/ However, there are caveats about that approach in Thunderbird given here: http://kb.mozillazine.org/Run_multiple_copies_of_Thunderbird_at_the_sa me_time I sure wish Thunderbird was a better email client. That's exactly the kind of thing I could really use for email (if it turned out to be safe). I had misremembered that the Mozilla browsers provided the functionality to run new windows in a separate memory space. Turns out this is an Internet Explorer feature, and one of the few things in IE that I envy and wish Mozilla-based browsers supported (IE6 launches an independent process each time you doubleclick the IE icon; I seem to remember that there used to be a setting to control this, but I don't see it anywhere). This is especially the case for web development, where I've often got many windows open testing many things, and sometimes the HTML/CSS flushes out bugs that cause the browser to crash. In those cases, it would sure be nice if the other instances of my browser were in independent memory spaces so that one going down wouldn't take down all of them. -- David W. Fenton http://dfenton.com David Fenton Associates http://dfenton.com/DFA/ _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
