OS X Annoyances: Setting the Default Browser
I have a number of Web browsers installed (there’s no perfect one, but I keep looking...) and the most recent one I installed was Firefox 0.8. I tried making Firefox my default browser by setting it in the Internet preferences pane (under Mac OS 10.2.8). Firefox 0.8 was included in the drop-down menu of browsers, so naturally I chose it. Silly me. What actually happened is that the system ignored this choice and actually selected Firebird, which was still installed. (Perhaps because Firefox was formerly called Firebird? Who knows.) That’s right, I selected Firefox, but when I closed and reopened the Internet preference pane, Firebird was selected, and that’s what the system used when I clicked URLs. I thought maybe if I manually selected Firefox instead of picking it off the menu, that would fix it. Uh, no. After fruitlessly searching through and subsequently trashing com.apple.internetpref.plist, com.apple.internetconfig.plist, and com.apple.iTunes.eq.plist, I gave up and trashed my copy of Firebird. That fixed the problem. Interestingly, if I have Mozilla open instead of Firefox, URLs are sent to Mozilla instead of launching Firefox. I guess the system thinks they’re “the same,” in a similar way that Firefox and Firebird are the same.