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Make links in twhirl open in Firefox on Vista

21 Comments

I’ve been using the twhirl client to connect to Twitter from my Windows Vista computer at work. It’s been great, except that links to web pages were opening in Internet Explorer rather than Firefox, which is my default browser. I had noticed the same behaviour in Pownce as well. Both of these applications are built on the Adobe Air runtime.

I found a knowledge base article at Adobe’s site which recommends setting the default browser in the Program Access and Computer Defaults dialog in Vista. Here are the steps:

  1. Select Start > Default Programs > Set Program Access And Computer Defaults.
  2. Click Continue in the Security Alert dialog box, if it appears.
  3. Select Custom, and then select your preferred browser under Choose A Default Web Browser; click OK.

The problem I had was that Firefox wasn’t showing up as one of the options under Choose A Default Web Browser. The fix for me was to download the Firefox installer and reinstall over top of my existing Firefox installation. After doing that, Firefox showed up in the list.

Note that I had to close Firefox and reopen it after changing the setting for it to take effect. (Before I did that, clicking on links in twhirl had no effect.)

21 thoughts on “Make links in twhirl open in Firefox on Vista”

  2. Just found you through Google, because I had the same Problem.
    Thank’s to you I can live happily ever after! 😀

  3. I tried messing around with those options too, but figured “my current Web browser” meant firefox… I guess not. Awesome fix.

  5. I was having the same problem with my Adobe AIR apps in Mac OSX as well. (Twhirl, TweetDeck, etc.). Here’s the fix:

    Close your Adobe AIR apps.
    Open Safari
    Open Safari Preferences
    Select a browser that you do NOT want to be your default browser.
    Re-select the browser you would like to be default.
    Open your Adobe AIR app.

    That should work. Pretty simple.

  7. Thanks! I always thought Firefox was my default browser and the box wasn’t ticked. now my Tweetdeck works the way I want it to. gracias!

  8. This is actually a problem for me in Ubuntu Jaunty ever since I upgraded to Firefox-3.5
    Reinstalling the browser or setting it as default every way I can didn’t help.

    Adobe needs to learn how to interact with system settings apparently, since they seemed to miss the mark on all three supported operating systems. -__-

    If anyone has a workaround for linux, speak up, although it’s likely Adobe will have to fix something.

  9. @Jay: I’ve been using TweetDeck (another Adobe Air applicaion) on Jaunty with Firefox-3.5 with no issues. I presume you’ve checked the web browser setting in System > Settings > Preferred Applications already?

  10. @Ryan: Yes. The dropdown box is set to “Custom” and the Command is
    firefox-3.5 %s
    The default browser is launched with every application (via Thunderbird, Pidgin, etc. for example) except Tweetdeck.

  12. This fix works with Mac OS X only until the next restart. 🙁 And in the meantime, all your HTML docs turn into URLs and open in a browser, not Dreamweaver.

    Adobe has a lot of work to do…

  14. HELP!

    I have WINDOWS XP…

    Okay so whenever I open a link in Tweetdeck, it always opens it in Internet Explorer. I want it to open in Firefox, which I’ve always use since IE started giving me problems.

    What I’ve done to TRY to fix it is this:
    Clicked “Start”
    Clicked “Set Program Access and Defaults”
    Clicked “Custom”
    Under “Choose A Default Web Browser” the options were use my current web browser, IE, Firefox, and Netscape.
    The option that was already chosen was Use my current Web browser.
    So I clicked on Firefox.
    I clicked OK.
    I closed Tweetdeck and when I opened it and opened a link, it STILL WAS IE.

    I have no idea what to do. It is very annoying.

    Thanks…

  15. Hi Mike,

    Did you make sure to close Firefox and re-open it after selecting the default web browser?

    If that doesn’t help, you might want to try reinstalling Firefox, since that helped me when I originally had that problem.

  16. Ryan,

    Okay I closed firefox. And I selected Firefox. Opened firefox. Opened tweetdeck but still didn’t work.

    How do you reinstall firefox, I’ll try that.

    Thanks…

  20. Well that sort of fixed my problem. Links in Tweetdeck open, but in Chrome not Firefox. I re-did it a couple of times. However it’s still better than nothing as I had before.

    thanks,

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