When I start

/Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/firefox-bin

on MacOSX using Process.Start() using Mono, the id of the process that gets returned does not match the process that firefox ends up running under.

It looks like firefox quickly decides to start another process, and kill the current one.

This makes it difficult to stop firefox, and to detect if it is still running. I've tried starting firefox using the -no-remote flag, to no avail.

Is there a way to start firefox in such a way that it doesn't do this "I'll quickly make a new process for you" dance?

The situation can somewhat be detected by making sure Firefox keeps on running for at least 3 seconds after its start, and when it does not, scan for other firefox processes. However, this technique is shaky at best, as on slow days it might take a bit more than 3 seconds, and then all tests depending on this behaviour fail.

It turns out, that this behaviour only happens when asking firefox to start a specific profile using -P MyProfile. (Which I need to do, as I need to start firefox with specific proxyserver settings) If I start firefox "normally" it does stick to its process.