Thunderbird now plays well with Firefox

I had been a non-conformist in many ways with regard to installing my own tarball of Thunderbird and Firefox instead of using the packaged RPMs Fedora already built. I mainly did this because they are considered stable by Mozilla yet one version ahead of RPMs.

Late last year I had run into problems with my system dieing for various reasons and I had suspected Firefox. I knelt down and installed the RPM leaving the tarball version in place and changing my app links to point to the correct bin. Soon to follow was Thunderbird as well.

Well today I discovered I had been starting Firefox in a variety of ways. I noticed that Firefox was upgrading to 2.0.0.12 but failed due to incompatible extensions I guess. Then I started wondering why the RPM would allow me to be upgrading in this fashion anyway. I looked at my processes and noticed Firefox running from /usr/lib/firefox/firefox-bin which is where I put my tarball installation.

I double checked my link to Firefox and it says it is linked to /usr/bin/firefox which is actually /usr/lib/firefox-2.0.0.10/firefox-bin. So how the heck was the old (newer) Firefox getting started?

In process list I noticed it also had some reference to a website I had clicked on from an email and from there I remembered I launched Firefox via Thunderbird.

I proceeded to remove the /usr/lib/firefox directory. Then from Thunderbird I hit a link form email. Nothing happened. Ugh! Well I have experienced this before but never really fixed it. Mainly just dragged the link into Firefox to get around it. This time I looked around and read many different offers to the problem but only tired one. I believe this fix works the same way depending on your packagers file names; either user.js or prefs.js in your Thunderbird profile directory. Add these lines to the .js file:

user_pref("network.protocol-handler.app.http", "/usr/bin/firefox");
user_pref("network.protocol-handler.app.https", "/usr/bin/firefox");
user_pref("network.protocol-handler.app.ftp", "/usr/bin/firefox");

Now, one trick to this... and be advised... don't make edits while Thunderbird is still open. Once you close TB, your changes are flushed back to the current TB session. Edit your .js file after you close TB.