Monday, October 29, 2007

Thunderbird won't open http links

Sometimes, in Linux, after an update or a brand new install, Thunderbird won't open http links (e.g., with Firefox). This might depend on some default configuration value of your distribution.

However, the quickest, and, as far as I know, distribution independent solution, is to manually set these preferences in the prefs.js file:

user_pref("network.protocol-handler.app.ftp", "firefox");
user_pref("network.protocol-handler.app.http", "firefox");
user_pref("network.protocol-handler.app.https", "firefox");
where "firefox" can be replaced with your preferred browser.

Alternatively, you might set these settings with the config editor available from the "advanced" tab. You'll probably need to create new entries for these preferences (of type string).

Hope this helps, at least until the problem is fixed in your distribution :-)

12 comments:

lipbalm said...

Perfect. This saved me a lot of frustration. Thanks so much for posting.

betto said...

Great!
glad to hear that :-)

Anonymous said...

hah, thank you very much! Good work.

Anderson Family said...

Works great... but it opens a new window. How can I get it to open in the current browser window?

betto said...

Eric, the browser behavior does not depend on thunderbird: there's a setting in the browser for specifying what to do if a browser request is performed by another program (at least in Firefox).
Hope this helps :-)

Ketan said...

I did this. but its still not working. its a fresh installation.
linux: FC9
ff: version 3 beta 5
thunderbird: 2.0.0.14

betto said...

are you sure you put the correct path to your firefox binary?

Anonymous said...

Thanks a lot for the tip!

Anonymous said...

I want to leave my thanks too!! This has been driving me nuts for months!!

Anonymous said...

Thanks, works perfectly.

Tux2000

Anonymous said...

Thanks a lot, this worked for me in Thunderbird on Kubuntu 9.10 and Firefox

Anonymous said...

Thanks, it worked!