Icedove (Thunderbird) clicking link woes.

I run a mixture of Debian Testing and Unstable as my workstation, and some how I broke "opening a browser" on clicking a link in Icedove.

I dont know if I am responsible or if it was Debian but either way, heres some tips to get it working (N.B. I take no responsibility if you break your system. You may want to take a back up).

First things first check /etc/alternatives. Make sure x-www-browser is a symlink to /usr/bin/iceweasel (I found mine was set to chrome). But for me, run the following:

sudo update-alternatives --config x-www-browser
There are 4 choices for the alternative x-www-browser (providing /usr/bin/x-www-browser).

  Selection    Path                    Priority   Status
------------------------------------------------------------
  0            /usr/bin/google-chrome   120       auto mode
  1            /usr/bin/dillo           50        manual mode
  2            /usr/bin/google-chrome   120       manual mode
* 3            /usr/bin/iceweasel       70        manual mode
  4            /usr/bin/opera           90        manual mode

Press enter to keep the current choice[*], or type selection number:

did not fix my problem.

Next was to check icedoves registery.

Go Edit -> Preferences -> General -> Config Editor.
Copy and paste "network.protocol" in filter

Make sure
network.protocol-handler.app.http needs to be x-www-browser
network.protocol-handler.app.https needs to be x-www-browser

If you got all this ... then great.

The registery and value I found that I needed to be change was

network.protocol-handler.warn-external.http

All I did was right click and select "Toggle".

Close and start icedove, go to an email with a link, click it and then you will be prompted with an "Open application box", select /etc/alternatives/x-www-browser

And thats it.

HTH

Brent