Firefox as the default browser: opening issues

Firefox 0.9 has a bug that causes errors of style "The system cannot find the file specified" when urls are opened using the default browser (ie. just starting a new process with the url as programname). If you're using .net, System.Diagnostics.Process.Start("http://www.heikniemi.net/") nets you a System.ComponentModel.Win32Exception from System.Diagnostics.Process.StartWithShellExecuteEx. Scary, huh?
Luckily it's just a Firefox bug, bug 246078 to be exact. It has been fixed, but at the moment no release available has the fix (apart from nightly builds). There is a 3rd party registry hack that fixes the issue.
Slightly related, Firefox has recently started opening external URIs in new windows. This is being discussed in bug 172962, and right now it looks like Firefox 1.0 is going to have a user option which allows you to select the behavior between "Last active window/tab", "New tab in last active window" and "New window". Yay!

August 27, 2004 · Jouni Heikniemi · No Comments
Posted in: Web