Tuesday, September 18, 2007

Vista won't use Firefox as default browser

Going along with the theme of my last post, this is my short story about getting Vista to recognize Firefox as the default browser for all applications.

When I upgraded to a workstation with Vista, I had several problems with getting things to run smoothly. I previously blogged about my problems using Trillian. But I could never figure out why Vista would not recognize Firefox as the default browser for things like Google Desktop search, or when clicking a link from within an Outlook email. I spent time several months ago trying to solve the problem, messing with all kinds of settings in the control panel, to no avail. Then a few days ago, I decided to try again. I googled for "vista defaulting to IE not firefox" which returned this result from a cnet forum. The post describes how installing Safari, and then using Safari to manage the global browser preference will make my problem go away. I install Safari, then go into Safari's preferences and set the default browser to be Firefox. Presto! Everything now uses Firefox as the default browser including the two main problems areas of Google Desktop Search and Outlook. Thank you to Safari, no thank you to Vista.

I am sure there are other ways to fix this problem, but this one was quick, simple and painless.

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