259573 - when Firefox is the default browser, ShellExecute returns ERROR_FILE_NOT_FOUND

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Firefox :: Installer, defect)

Description

[Sam Steingold]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.7) Gecko/20040614 Firefox/0.8
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.7) Gecko/20040614 Firefox/0.8

When Firefox is the default browser, ShellExecute returns ERROR_FILE_NOT_FOUND.
When IE is the default broser, ShellExecute succeeds.

In both cases the web page is correctly opened.

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1.start gnu emacs
2.M-x browse-url RET
3.http://clisp.cons.org RET
4.emacs signals a "file-not-found" error from ShellExecute.

Actual Results:  
the page is correctly disaplayed in Firefox, 
but an Emacs error is signalled.

Expected Results:  
no error should be signalled.
when the default browser is IE, there is no error.

This is NOT emacs-specific.
You can do the same in CLISP:
firefox is the default browser:
(ShellExecuteA nil "open" "http://clisp.cons.org" nil "." sw_normal)
2 ;; ERROR_FILE_NOT_FOUND
IE is the default browser:
(ShellExecuteA nil "open" "http://clisp.cons.org" nil "." sw_normal)
42 ;; > 32 ==> success!

I am sure you can write a test program like that in C also.

Comment 1

[Sam Steingold]

Solution:
remove the following registry keys:
HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\http\shell\open\ddeexec\
HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\https\shell\open\ddeexec\
when I remove them with regedit the problem goes away.

firefox installation should do this automatically.

Comment 2

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

To firefox.

Comment 3

[Sebastian Schuberth]

> remove the following registry keys:
> HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\http\shell\open\ddeexec\
> HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\https\shell\open\ddeexec\
> when I remove them with regedit the problem goes away.
> 
> firefox installation should do this automatically.

Firefox should also delete / clear the default value at

HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\http[s]\shell

Some browsers (e.g. MyIE2) set this value to "MyIE2", which causes ShellExecute
not to use the browser mentioned at

HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\http[s]\shell\open\command

(where Firefox registers itself) but the one at

HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\http[s]\MyIE2

Comment 4

[:Gavin Sharp [email: [e-mail]]]

This was likely fixed as part of bug 246078. Sam, can you confirm?

Comment 5

[Sam Steingold]

since I cleaned up the registry, I have not seen this problem.

Comment 6

[:Gavin Sharp [email: [e-mail]]]

Yes, but the fix is that Firefox should not be "dirtying" the registry in the first place. If you could test using a recent build and confirm, that'd be great.

Comment 7

[Sam Steingold]

I use 1.0.7 without any problems.
is that recent enough?

Comment 8

[:Gavin Sharp [email: [e-mail]]]

(In reply to comment #7)
> I use 1.0.7 without any problems.
> is that recent enough?

Yep, bug 246078 was fixed for 1.0. Thanks!