I’ve been using the latest Xubuntu (11.10) for a couple of weeks now on my netbook and must say I’m very pleased with it. I’ve only got a couple of issues with it, one of them Thunderbird not using my default browser (Chromium), but Firefox, to open external links. But no more! After searching a bit on the internet I got the suggestion for setting network.protocol-handler.app.http and network.protocol-handler.app.https to x-www-browser. Unfortunately this doesn’t seem to work anymore.
The right way to do it now is open your about:config (from the menu: Edit > Preferences > Advanced). Open the Configuration Editor and search for both network.protocol-handler.warn-external.http and network.protocol-handler.warn-external.https. These two are most likely to have a value of false. Change it to true and the next time you’ll try to open a link from some e-mail it’ll ask you which browser to use. Chromium isn’t likely to be shown in the list of choices, so use the navigate button. You can find Chromium at /usr/bin/chromium-browser.
Now to find a fix for my other two problems: netbook won’t recover from sleep mode and somehow it won’t let me use a 1080p resolution through HDMI on a external screen.
Nice! Had been trying various tricks. This simple one did the trick. Thanks!
You’re welcome :-). I hope they somehow fix this in the future to use the preferred browser by default.
Yeeees ! Thanks for this simple trick I didn’t thought of ! This is THE solution to choose the default browser to open links from Thunderbird under Linux. This is kind of weird that this value is set to false by default, like you must install and use Firefox, it looks like an Apple try to grab and keep you in the “iFamily” ! And this is not a good idea from an open-source software !
Does this issue still exist with Ubuntu 12.04 and upwards?
Yes, I’m running Ubuntu 12.04 x64 and the problem is still there. I don’t know for 13.04, I’ll let you know if I decide to upgrade !
I started with 11.10 on my NetBook as well and had to change this setting. Upgraded to 12.04 and I didn’t have to change anything. I’m pretty sure that if you upgrade that it remembers your settings. Only way to truly know this is to do a fresh install I guess.