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Lovelock: Mozilla as default browser from Thunderbird

Last week, I upgraded to Fedora 15 (codename: Lovelock). One of the new annoying "features" is that Google Chrome somehow got to be the default browser when I click a link from Firefox.

I Google'd around, and couldn't find how to fix it. So I decided to strace it. Apparently, Thunderbird launches gvfs-open to open a browser. Again I straced the command "gvfs-open https://www.geeklab.info", and found that it opens /usr/local/share/applications/defaults.list, which referred to google-chrome.desktop instead of mozilla-firefox.desktop. My file now contains:

[Default Applications]
text/html=mozilla-firefox.desktop
text/xml=mozilla-firefox.desktop
application/xhtml_xml=mozilla-firefox.desktop
x-scheme-handler/http=mozilla-firefox.desktop
x-scheme-handler/https=mozilla-firefox.desktop
x-scheme-handler/ftp=mozilla-firefox.desktop

And it's fixed! :-)

Update: Since some crap keeps changing this file, i just made the file immutable. The command chattr +i /usr/local/share/applications/defaults.list prevents programs that would normally have permissions to edit the file to be blocked.

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5 comments on “Lovelock: Mozilla as default browser from Thunderbird”

  1. Another thing I found is when settings linger in $HOME/.local/share/applications/ so if above doesn't work, check there for a defaults.list and a mimeapps.list.

  2. Thank you for this.

    I am using Kubuntu 11.10 and I was racking my brains doing things that I had done from over a decade ago to integrate Thunderbird and Firefox, until I stumbled upon your post.

    I have quoted your link in a How To post on Ubuntu Forums and when moderated I think it will be at the Tutorials and Tips section there.

    Can you please elucidate who this actually happened as I do not have gvfs-open in Kubuntu. Does it happen by clicking on the search results page graphics that appear to the right of search results? In any case, it is a sneaky default setting change that is repugnant and wasteful of time and effort.

    Thank you once again :-)

  4. Kudos to myself for writing this note. Still works on Fedora 17 :-)

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