I use chrome as my default browser. All application respect that (i.e. clicking on a link in the updater applet, or empathy open that page in chrome.) Thunderbird somehow ignores it. It opens a chrome window but does not open the right URL in it, but just the start page. Looking into it I found that it should execute /usr/lib/thunderbird-3.0/open-browser.sh. But after adding some debug statements to that I had to realize this is not executed at all. Searching further I found http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Chrome/thread?tid=479e566824181986&hl=en which suggest that other Fedora users have the same problem.
Please see my bugreport! :) https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=557599
strange. For me the setting of the default browser had an influence. I made chrome to the default browser by clicking a button in chromes option panel. So it is not using firefox constantly as in your case... The problem is that the URL gets not passed correctly to chrome and that /usr/lib/thunderbird-3.0/open-browser.sh is not executed at all.
Oh... gconf-editor Edit menu, Find... Type Search for: url-handlers Click OK Edit /desktop/gnome/url-handlers/http/command to xdg-open "%s" Edit /desktop/gnome/url-handlers/https/command to xdg-open "%s" Edit /desktop/gnome/url-handlers/ftp/command to xdg-open "%s" :)
The problem might be on chromes side: Chrome seems to set the following when it wants to be the default browser. [fm@thinkpad ~]$ gconftool-2 --get /desktop/gnome/url-handlers/http/command /opt/google/chrome/google-chrome It does work after changing to the following: [fm@thinkpad ~]$ gconftool-2 --get /desktop/gnome/url-handlers/http/command /opt/google/chrome/google-chrome "%s" The upstream report is at http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=23973
according to upstream. xdg-utils have to be updated. Although I am still wondering why just thunderbird needs the %s ...
xdg upstream has commited the patch by google. See http://webcvs.freedesktop.org/portland/portland/xdg-utils/
Gotcha.
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 580715 ***