1120853 - "Make Firefox my default browser" - not working if Firefox isn't registered correctly with Windows as a 'browser' option

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Firefox :: Installer, defect)

Description

[Martijn]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:34.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/34.0
Build ID: 20141126041045

Steps to reproduce:

Go to options and click "Make Firefox my default browser".


Actual results:

I expect links from programs (and url-files on the filesystem) to open in Firefox.


Expected results:

Instead they still open in my current default browser, which is Opera.

Comment 1

[Martijn]

It doesn't matter if the program from where a link is clicked, is started before or after having tried to set Firefox as default.

Also, maybe related, when trying to set Firefox as default, it doesn't present the UAC prompt to make such change - I suspect the UAV prompt is required for this (if not, then please ignore this).

Comment 2

[Martijn]

Also possibly related, Firefox does not appear in the list of programs in Control Panel\Programs\Default Programs\Set Default Programs. So I can't set Firefox as default "manually", either.

Comment 3

[Martijn]

Oh it does pin Firefox to my task bar. So it does do something. But pinning to the task bar isn't what I asked it to do! If I want Firefox pinned anywhere, I'll do that myself thank you very much.

Comment 4

[:Gijs (he/him)]

(In reply to Martijn from comment #0)
> User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:34.0) Gecko/20100101
> Firefox/34.0
> Build ID: 20141126041045
> 
> Steps to reproduce:
> 
> Go to options and click "Make Firefox my default browser".

If you follow the following steps:

1) open Tools > Web Developer > Browser Console
2) open Tools > Options
3) click the "clear" button in the browser console
4) click the "Make Firefox my default browser" button

do any (new) error messages show up in the browser console? If so, can you copy them here?

Comment 5

[Martijn]

I tried your suggestion, but no new error messages (or any new messages whatsoever) appear in the console after clicking the make-default button.

Comment 6

[Martijn]

Another update. Literally. Firefox updated itself to 35.0. Firefox now appears in the aforementioned "default programs" list in the control panel. Setting Firefox as the default browser from there worked fine.

I just checked another thing too: I can make Chrome set itself as the default browser perfectly fine.

This leads me to suspect the culprit may well have been the fact that Firefox was missing from the "default programs" list in the control panel. Chrome was there, and so was Opera, and on them the "set default" functioned perfectly.

So I believe the solution to this bug may be for Firefox to check if it's in that "default programs" list. And if not, then it should add itself and apply defaultness. Sound good?

Comment 7

[Martijn]

(also, Firefox devvers, please remove the "pin to taskbar" when setting Firefox as default - by convention this is not something that [should be/needs to be] part of making a program default)

Comment 8

[:Gijs (he/him)]

Jim, would you know more about this?

Martijn: how was this copy of Firefox originally installed? (trying to figure out why it wasn't in that "default programs" list to begin with)

Comment 9

[Jim Mathies [:jimm]]

(In reply to :Gijs Kruitbosch from comment #8)
> Jim, would you know more about this?
> 
> Martijn: how was this copy of Firefox originally installed? (trying to
> figure out why it wasn't in that "default programs" list to begin with)

This should all get setup by nsis during the install, so it sounds like something might have gone wrong when martin installed the afflicted version.

I can't reproduce this fwiw in nightly flipping between ie/nightly/chrome.

Maybe ask qa to do some testing to confirm this was a fluke?

Comment 10

[Jim Mathies [:jimm]]

While testing I ran across bug 1121418.

Comment 11

[Martijn]

I *might* have something to do with a fork of Firefox that I had installed actually, now that I think about it.

I had installed Pale Moon x64, but uninstalled it a few months back. Same goes for Firefox Developer Edition. I'm don't recall in which order I uninstalled these. Afterwards, I installed Cyberfox, so in terms of Gecko-based browsers I currently have Firefox 35 and Cyberfox 34 (& updating it now).