[CentOS] How does Firefox work? Really?

Thu Dec 13 15:40:09 UTC 2012
James B. Byrne <byrnejb at harte-lyne.ca>

I have, to me, perplexing situation.  I am attempting to run Firefox
on a CentOS-6.3 virtual machine to which I am connected using an SSH
link with X-Forwarding enabled. (ssh -Y userid at host.domain.tld).

The reason I wish to do this is that the vm is used for development an
my code coverage analysis tool produces a html format report which is
read via the file:// protocol.   I thought that if I ran Firefox on
that host then the Firefox window would open on my local machine,
which it does.  I also thought that since that Firefox window was
actually running as an instance on the remote vm that the file://
protocol for that Firefox would seek out files on the vm's filesystem,
which it does not.  Instead that Firefox instance searches the local
machine's filesystem and not that of the vm from which it was
launched.

This seems counter-intuitive to me.  What is going on?


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