Zulus Tips

If you use Mozilla Thunderbird with KDE you already know that by default Thunderbird open hyperlinks in konqueror. If konqueror your main browser - this post is not for you ;-) Below you can find way how-to force Thunderbird to open hyperlinks in Firefox.

First thing that we need to do is create shell script:
#!/bin/bash
url="$1"
exec /path/to/firefox "$url"


Save that script to Thunderbird default folder. In my case: ~/.mozilla-thunderbird
Now, make that script executable.

Please close Thunderbird and open file prefs.js in your favorite text editor. You can find that file inside Thunderbird profile directory. For example:

~/.mozilla-thunderbird/XXXXXX.default/prefs.js


Now you need add following strings to the end of prefs.js

user_pref("network.protocol-handler.app.ftp", "~/.mozilla-thunderbird/openlink.sh");
user_pref("network.protocol-handler.app.http", "~/.mozilla-thunderbird/openlink.sh");
user_pref("network.protocol-handler.app.https", "~/.mozilla-thunderbird/openlink.sh");


Where openlink.sh file shell script that we saved before.

Now just start Thunderbird and click to any link. It should always open it in Firefox.

I don’t know why Thunderbird didn’t use system default browser either i dont know why there is no settings about broswer in Thunderbird Preferences. I hope this will be fixed sometime, because way above is not clear and not portable.  Usually same methods called “hack” ;-)

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 28th, 2007 at 9:35 pm and is filed under Linux, FireFox, How-To, KDE. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.