Post-upgrade, Thunderbird now opening URLs in wrong browser

[chconnor]

After the upgrade (21.10 to 22.04) Thunderbird is now opening URLs in emails in Chromium, but my main browser is Firefox (and TB used to open in Firefox just fine.)

If I try "gio open http://blah.com" it opens in Chromium, but "xdg-open http://blah.com" opens in Firefox.

Any hints as to where I should be configuring gnome (I guess? or GTK?) to open links in the correct system browser? I tried researching this but there are 20 different suggestions and long lists of mime types and so forth and I'm a little lost as to what the proper route is these days.

Thanks!

[Snowhog]

Old, but may still be relevant: https://askubuntu.com/questions/1301...ks-in-chromium

[chconnor]

Thanks! I got it working using info from that thread, but I had to figure out my own way. I added a more detailed answer there; but here's what I had to do:

* edit configs, change network.protocol-handler.warn-external.http and network.protocol-handler.warn-external.https to true

* click on an http and then an https link in thunderbird; for each, a dialog will appear

* importantly, in the dialog do not simply change it to "Firefox" (this worked once for me, but not thereafter). Instead: browse to /snap/bin/firefox (which is where firefox now lives in *buntu, I take it) and check "always open" with this app

(Note: I had to delete (i.e. rename) my handlers.json because once it was set the "warn" configs no longer had an effect, and setting it through the GUI also didn't change anything. This may have side effects for other handlers, so be warned.)

[rab0171610]

Thank you for posting clear and concise steps to the solution for others. OH, the joys of snaps. SMH.
I am wondering if a symlink from /snap/bin/firefox to /usr/bin/firefox would have been enough to solve the issue in some setups?

[chconnor]

OH, the joys of snaps. SMH.

I hate them, but I'm not qualified enough to complain, so I'm glad you said it. :-)

I am wondering if a symlink from /snap/bin/firefox to /usr/bin/firefox would have been enough to solve the issue in some setups?

Yeah, I don't know. But if you check my answer on that askubuntu.com question, you'll see that the handlers.json that was being generated for me seemed to be incorrect... it was calling "env %u" for one (http) where %u is the URL, in other words it didn't even fill out the executable. For https it had:

env BAMF_DESKTOP_FILE_HINT=/var/lib/snapd/desktop/applications/firefox_firefox.desktop /snap/bin/firefox %u

...I can run that command manually and it works fine, so I'm not sure what the issue was. I probably didn't do the most thorough debugging along the way, either, so take all this with a grain of salt.

[rab0171610]

Ok that answers my question, probably would not be a solution in that case.