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I run on Debian Linux across 3 monitors and using 3 separate X Servers. I.e. the is an application menu on each screen and although I can not drag and drop between the monitors I am so used to where things are that drag and drop in a non issue.

For a while now I've been trying to get Chrome to open separate instances on each X Server. However I can not seem to get it going. Basically if I open Chrome on the first X Server and subsequently try to open Chrome on the second X Server, the Chrome window still opens on the first X Server.

Does anyone have a solution for this?


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up vote 3 down vote accepted

After some further research I came across this bug report and interestingly enough Comment 13 suggests to change /usr/bin/google-chrome to:

exec /opt/google/chrome/google-chrome --enable-greasemonkey --enable-user-scripts --enable-extensions --user-data-dir=~/.config/google-chrome/$DISPLAY "$@"

So rather than overwriting the /usr/bin/google-chrome I created a ~/bin/chrome shell script put the command in there, and used that to launch Chrome on each X Server Screen and it worked perfectly with each X Server now having it's own version of Chrome.

As mentioned in the comment on the bug report it seems to create a new profile for each display. However for me it's actually better, as 1 display I tend to use for email/communication/etc hence a set of Chrome plug-ins, another screen for development work and hence another set of Chrome plug-ins, etc.

And finally if you need to sync book marks, I use xmarks with a plugin installed in each Chrome profile.

Anyway hope this helps someone!

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The same goes to firefox as well. I made my changes below:

Multiuser Firefox | Multiple users allowed after this changes are applied.

/usr/bin/firefox -> /opt/firefox/multiuser-firefox

The command/script is as follows:

exec /opt/firefox/firefox --enable-greasemonkey --enable-user-scripts --enable-extensions --user-data-dir=~/.mozilla/$DISPLAY "$@"
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