Description of problem: If you click on a URL like this in Firefox irc://irc.freenode.net/#pootle then by default it tries to launch xchat. It should try to launch Pidgin which seems to be the defacto multi-protocol engine for Fedora. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): libpurple-2.2.1-1.fc7 How reproducible: In Firefox click on a irc:// style URL and it will offer to launch an xchat session. There is another fault that even if you set the network.protocol-handler.app.irc and network.protocol-handler.external.irc in about:config that it offers to use purple-url-handler but does not function correctly. Steps to Reproduce: 1. Go to a webpage with irc://irc.freenode.net/#pootle 2. Click on the link 3. Offered xchat Actual results: Firefox tries to launch xchat Expected results: Firefox tries to launch pidgin Additional info: As mentioned above I tried to alter the custom configs for Firefox this only offers to run purple-url-handler if you specify the full path (it doesn't actually launch anything however) if you don't specify the full path it will offer xchat. Another option around this could be that the preferred application chooser should be configurable to offer xchat or pidgin to users who want to launch these types of URLs.
This is working as requested for me, with default settings in Firefox. What does this command report? gconftool-2 -g /desktop/gnome/url-handlers/irc/command
[dwayne@dhcppc32 ~]$ gconftool-2 -g /desktop/gnome/url-handlers/irc/command purple-url-handler "%s" I undid the changes that I need to make in Firefox to get Pidgin to launch and it continued to work correctly and launch Pidgin. Marking as WORKSFORME certainly for Fedora 8