2011-12-18.

Something that's several times bugged me about openoffice,
libreoffice and firefox is that they don't `behave nicely'
in some cases of opening multiple windows.

For example, one might have multiple virtual desktops on 
a single display, and have an instance of openoffice running 
on another desktop than the one currently in use for (say) an 
email program.  In some cases, attempting to open an attached
wordprocessor file could result in an error that shows only 
on the other desktop with the existing window. 

More reliably and annoyingly, if one has two displays such as 
a local login and a vnc session, with (e.g.) openoffice already
open on one, attempts at opening further files on the other 
display will open them on the first ... not many people guess 
this as the reason when (apparently) nothing happens after 
trying to open the file.

Sometimes I use ssh (-XY) to run firefox remotely, if for 
example the remote computer is on a network with priviledged 
access to some webpages.  
What often happens is that a local instance of firefox starts,
i.e. it's clear that firefox is actually the application on the 
local machine, not the remote ssh server where the firefox 
command was run!

---

The troubles with multiple displays have been complained of 
already to *office, with response only that this absurd defect 
would be too hard to correct.

The troubles with firefox turn out not to be so stupid.
http://askubuntu.com/questions/3515/how-do-i-launch-a-remote-firefox-window-via-ssh

Answer 5 (by "ithkuil") from the above site was very interesting:
  * besides firefox -no-remote another parameter is firefox -no-xshm 
     which reveals the technique used to make it work.
  * X11 shared memory is an interprocess communication technique which 
     can be used by all applications connected to a given x server 
     session. It can be used to perform drag & drop, and other kind 
     of desktop interaction.
     It can be (and is) used also to implement "open once" applications, 
     in order to reduce the footprint (or the number of windows).
  * Since the X11 protocol is network transparent the "shared memory" is 
     extended also to remote X11 clients.

Very interesting!

One can also set up the environment to make default settings: e.g.,
MOZ_NO_REMOTE=1 
export MOZ_NO_REMOTE