Xfhelp 4.2 fails in default setting

[Jasper Huijsmans]

purslow at sympatico.ca wrote:
...
> 
> i use Gentoo, which has a  400 line  script to start Firefox:
> that is the source of the message "No running windows found".
> Xfce ought to try to work correctly on all the major distros.
> 

No running windows found is fine. Returning 0 on failure is not.

> are you really saying that the default installation of Firefox,
> which other distros follow, requires a user to enter the long line above, ie
> 
>   firefox -a firefox -remote openurl\("file//<helppath>",new-window\)   ??
> 

yes

> surely, whatever the distro, 'firefox URL' should work,
> ie the 2nd line in the Firefox case in the script above
> (ordinarily, i wouldn't expect the "..." to be necessary either).
> 

... ?

> why not simply use that 2nd shorter line ?
> 

firefox in it's default install shows a profile manager when there 
already is another  instance running, so we first try to use that and on 
failure we run regular firefox.

> and why write the script so that it uses Firefox (if installed)
> rather than Konqueror or Galeon or Opera ?
> 

why not?