Thunderbird: Default app used to open links in email

[vwgtiturbo]

Okay, now it works... to an extent.
Let's say I have Thunderbird open, and I have Firefox open.
If I click a link in an email, since Firefox is open, it will ask me which Firefox profile I want to use. If I select 'default', which is the only profile I have on the machine, then I will get an error that it is already in use. If I close Firefox, then all is well.
On the other hand, we have this...
If I have Thunderbird and Firefox open already, and click a mailto link on a webpage, it will ask me which Thunderbird profile I want to use. If I select default, once again, the only one on the machine, then I will get an error that the profile is already in use. If I close Thunderbird, all is well. I cannot figure out, for the life of me, why they made this so damn difficult. I thought one of the 'selling' points of the Mozilla project was how well Thunderbird and Firefox played together... Oh well... If I was a programmer, I would be able to actually help instead of gripe

[SkyNet]

Did you stick the user.js in your .thunderbird/profilename dir?

This piece of code:

if $MOZILLA_FIVE_HOME/mozilla-xremote-client -a firefox openURL\("$url, new-tab"\);

is supposed to prevent it from asking for a profile in firefox and start in a new tab. In particular the -a firefox part.

Also you might need to recopy the code for openlink.sh because it copied over wrong during orignial post, and that could also be why it's not working right, because of a newline character.

[joerenes]

awesome! I copied the openlink.sh script to my thunderbird install directory and put the user.js file in my .thunderbird/profilename directory and it works fine. no problems with trying to start a new session. this had been irritating me for a long time. thanks!

[SkyNet]

Yes, the openlink.sh is working perfectly. The mailto.sh isn't quite there yet. It only works if Thunderbird isn't open already. I'll try to fix it, and post the corrected code.

[edit]
Actually scatch that. That code should be working, but it doesn't on my machine. I need to figure out why.
[/edit]

joerenes, good to see you have it working to your liking now. Also welcome to GLO. Hope you find other posts that are useful to you.

[Fredsome]

Hey SkyNet,
Thanks a lot. It's almost working perfectly for me. This is so cool, I really like Mozilla stuff, but I couldn't stand that they didn't work together. The only glitch I have is that the part of the script that opens up the new tap doesn't work on my machine. It just adds ",&20new-tab" to the end of the link. And thanks for being so informative; I just found this thread by searching google, and immediately registered for GetLinuxOnline.
--AaronO

[SkyNet]

Fredsome,
That's good to hear. What distro are you using? Make sure you follow the instructions to the letter, and copy that script exactly, and it should work for Firefox perfectly. Also I can give you live help if you stop by our IRC channel located on the main GLO website. Just click on the Live Help button.

[jkuritzky]

Hi. I just stumbled on this thread (and very nice site) through a Google search. I've been using Thunderbird/Firefox for a while now and have been using the following script to open links (from Thunderbird) in Firefox:

#!/bin/sh -x
/usr/local/firefox/firefox -a firefox -remote "openURL("$@",new-tab)" ||
exec /usr/local/firefox/firefox "$@";

This works well, but I have one question:

Is there a way to modify the script so that Firefox remains in the background? Right now, whenever I click a link in Thunderbird, it will load in a new tab in Firefox, but Firefox will activate immediately and I end up having to click/alt-tab to get back to Thunderbird.

I'm running KDE 3.2 on Mandrake 10.

Thanks in advance,
-Joshua

[SkyNet]

I believe there is a way to do this, and I will edit this post when I get home to hopefully solve this problem for you.

EDIT
Okay, I have you covered. You need to download, and install this Firefox extension: Tabbrowser Extensions
The home page is located here in case you wish to have a look around.

Okay after all this good stuff is done, navigate to Tools -> Extensions -> Tabbrowser Extensions -> Preferences. From there goto Focus then you can select Other Applications from the Load new tab in the background when it is opened by section. That should solve your problem.

[jkuritzky]

That did it!

Thanks,
-Joshua

[ubertux]

Good stuff SkyNet. Finally solve this annoying problem. Thank you very much.