-no-remote prevents using Tor Browser as default browser
I'm the author of Tor Browser Launcher. I'd like to make it possible for Linux users to easily set Tor Browser as their default browser. The start-tor-browser script now passes extra arguments into firefox when you run it, so you can run:
./start-tor-browser https://www.torproject.org/
Tor Browser will open to https://www.torproject.org/. But if you already have a Tor Browser window open and you run:
./start-tor-browser https://tails.boum.org/
It throws the error:
Firefox is already running, but is not responding. To open a new window, you must first close the existing Firefox process, or restart your system.
This is because the line that runs firefox is ./Browser/firefox -no-remote --class "Tor Browser" -profile Data/Browser/profile.default "${@}", and -no-remote prevents any remote commands such as opening new tabs: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=650078
How come firefox is run with -no-remote? I assume there's a reason behind it. Is it useful for privacy/anonymity/data minimization? Would it be bad to patch start-tor-browser to remove -no-remote?
As long as -no-remote is there, I don't think it's possible to set Tor Browser as your default browser.
Here's my upstream bug about this: https://github.com/micahflee/torbrowser-launcher/issues/103