On Tue, Apr 25, 2006 at 06:05:11PM -0400, Richard Stallman wrote:
>     alternatives, in descending order of desirability, like so:
> 
>       firefox -remote "openURL(http://www.emacswiki.org,new-tab)" ||

Ah, yes, sorry -- I should've mentioned: it tries to send a command to
an already running browser instance (in this case open an URL in a new
tab). If there is no browser reachable (in the X session, I guess), the
command just fails.

So basically there is no difference in whether we try to open something
in a running browser or starting a new browser instance (just different
command lines to try). This would work for Mozilla based browsers; I
don't know about others (but I'd expect them to mimic Mozilla in this
respect).

So my proposal was just to have a list of methods to try (the user
chosing the priorities) -- in the default list, we'd try first (say)
a running Firefox instance, then (say) a running Mozilla instance and so
on, then starting a Firefox instance.

One could do this in an external shell script (so Emacs wouldn't be
aware of all this going on) or as a Lisp function (so the user could
Customize the prioritized list. Usually the distributors will provide a
sensible default).

Now we'd have to find out whether other browsers support a similar thing
to -remote (i.e. open an URL in a running instance and let us know it
worked).

Regards
-- tomás