Categories
Unix

Getting Thunderbird to use Google Chrome

I’ve been using Google Chrome on my Fedora11 system lately, it seems to handle Flash better than Firefox does (on linux). There were a few things I found missing in Chrome at first, but they are releasing version updates pretty regularly that are fixing all my issues.

But I had been putting up with my Thunderbird email client spawning Firefox when I would click http links in emails. I tried to fix this via the KDE system GUI, and via the Thunderbird preferences->config-editor functions but nothing would work.

I would also see an error in my thunderbird logfile that looks like:
Error: uncaught exception: [Exception… “Component returned failure code: 0x80004005 (NS_ERROR_FAILURE) [nsIExternalProtocolService.loadUrl]” nsresult: “0x80004005 (NS_ERROR_FAILURE)” location: “JS frame :: chrome://communicator/content/contentAreaClick.js :: openLinkExternally :: line 188” data: no]

Eventually I found this gnome tool did the trick!

% gconftool-2 -g /desktop/gnome/url-handlers/http/command
firefox %s
% gconftool-2 --type string -s /desktop/gnome/url-handlers/http/command "google-chrome %s"
% gconftool-2 -g /desktop/gnome/url-handlers/http/command
google-chrome %s

Also, while you’re at it, do the same commands but use “https” instead of “http” to handle SSL URLs.
Another way to do this is to use “gconf-editor” — just “yum install gconf-editor”