332631 - clicking on links within an email causes Internet explorer operating problems

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Thunderbird :: Mail Window Front End, defect)

Description

[Steven Dalton-Annett]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.2; en-GB; rv:1.8.0.1) Gecko/20060111 Firefox/1.5.0.1
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.2; en-GB; rv:1.8.0.1) Gecko/20060111 Firefox/1.5.0.1

When having Thunderbird V1.5 and Firefox V1.5.1 installed on a AMD Athlon 64 X2 dual core 3800+ running Microsoft Windows XP Pro and Microsoft Windows XP Pro x64.
When you click on a url link in an email within Thunderbird, the link opens up in Firefox, but it also sets firefox as the default browser, messing up the settings of Internet explorer 6 in the process. after prforming this task, open up IE6 and try to use it to browse the internet causes IE6 to try and route its operations through firefox.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.install Thunderbird and Firefox on x64
2.click on a url link in an email within Thunderbird
3.open IE6 and try to browse the internet, to see the problems that this action has caused

Actual Results:  
Internet explorer trys to open links clicked within firefox

Expected Results:  
well they should open within IE6

Comment 1

[Daniel Veditz [:dveditz]]

Thunderbird would not open Firefox unless Firefox were already set as the default browser in your OS -- Thunderbird has no explicit Firefox call, it just hands URLs to the OS to deal with. If Firefox were the default OS IE probably respects that for opening new links.

Thunderbird would not have changed the default browser; the Firefox install would have brought up a dialog telling you it wasn't the default and asking if you wanted to change it but it would not have changed it without asking.

Use the OS features to set the default browser to your choice ("Help and Support" option on the Start menu typically)