Default Email Program and Hidden Preferences for Firefox

Default email Program from Firefox

I use KDE with Fedora Core 3, and it seems that Mozilla Firefox doesn’t know how to respect my choice for default email program unless I brutally force it to.

The way to force it is to add the following “hidden preference” to the file user.js in your user directory for Firefox:

user_pref("network.protocol-handler.app.mailto","/usr/local/bin/thunderbird");

If your executable for thunderbird is not in /usr/local/bin, then replace the second string with whatever the full path to thunderbird is.

user.js is like prefs.js, except that firefox will explicitly not ever write to user.js, even though it will write and modify prefs.js.

Here are some other hidden preferences that I use in firefox:

When you press tab in a web page, only move the focus between form elements–don’t focus on the hyperlinks in the page as well:

user_pref("accessibility.tabfocus", 3);

Show more “unhidden” preferences in the Advanced tab of the Firefox preferences window. These new preferences let you control how to display links in firefox that were sent to it by external programs:

user_pref("browser.tabs.showSingleWindowModePrefs", true);

The first of the following two prefs turns on autoscroll, or what normally happens in Windows when you push the scroll wheel as a button, see a scroll icon, and then can scroll the page proportionally to the location of the mouse. The second preference is very important. It turns off pasting the contents of the clipboard into the URL location if you push the middle click in the middle of the web page area. Normally, if you at any point middle-click in the middle of your webpage, it will load whichever url is in the clipboard into the browser. This is usually gibberish. This hidden pref turns that “feature” off:

user_pref("general.autoScroll", true);
user_pref("middlemouse.contentLoadURL", false);