Ubuntu – How to make Thunderbird open links in Chromium

chromiumthunderbird

I want to be able to click links in Thunderbird emails and have them open in Chromium (package name chromium-browser). Instead, they open in Firefox.

I have tried the following:

  1. xfce preferred applications (Chromium is not listed, so I had to hunt down the executable)
    — next time I run chromium, it complains that it is no longer the default browser.

  2. Telling Chromium to set itself as the default browser. Thunderbird opens links in Firefox.

  3. update-alternatives. It's already listed as an alternative at the same priority as Firefox. The "open web browser" app menu item opens Chromium. Thunderbird opens links in Firefox.

I have looked through the entire preferences gui in Thunderbird (but not the advanced config editor yet) and seen nothing that mentions what browser to open links in.

Please note that this is not Google Chrome.

Best Answer

This is what I found working for me: You will need to access the "config editor" in Thunderbird itself.

Open Thunderbird. In 24.6.0, the menu can be accessed on the right hand side of the top menu bar (next to the search bar and is represented by three horizontal lines).

Click Edit > then click Preferences >, a new window will open. You will need to select the Advanced tab, at the bottom of that tab Open the Config Editor.

Then, search for both network.protocol-handler.warn-external.http and network.protocol-handler.warn-external.https.

These two are most likely to have a current value of false. Change the value to true (do this by simply right clicking on them) and the next time you try to open a link from some e-mail it'll ask you which browser to use. Chromium isn't likely to be shown in the list of choices, so use the navigate button. You can find Chromium at /usr/bin/chromium-browser.

If using google chrome as your browser of choice you may want to make it /usr/bin/google-chrome or /usr/bin/google-chrome-stable If Thunderbird doesn't ask you which browser to use when you click on a link after doing this, you can try deleting mimeTypes.rdf file in your profile folder to reset it. The profile folder is typically found as ~/.thunderbird/xxxxxxxx.default/

Original text by Htbaa

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