Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird do well together under Linux when the system determines whether an instance is already running or not, thus the calling other program will reuse the instance rather than launching one. Whe it launches, a Mozilla program locks the user profile by creating a ".lock" file, thus forbidding launch of a new instance.
Nowadays in most cases windows managers correctly determine a Mozilla app already running instance existence, unless Firefox changed since version 0.8/0.9 I used when I first encounter the problem of "profile in use" using KDE 3.2. So I started looking for a solution that remains anecdotical.
I also noticed that if you use a .tar.gz to install Firefox rather than a package, /usr/local/firefox/firefox differs from /usr/bin/firefox, and a symlink from /usr/local/firefox/firefox-bin to /usr/local/firefox/x-www-browser-bin is required if local Firefox is used as an alternative.
Add/modify these lines in <thunderbird profile>/user.js:
pref("network.protocol-handler.external.http", true); pref("network.protocol-handler.external.https", true); pref("network.protocol-handler.app.http", "/usr/bin/firefox"); pref("network.protocol-handler.app.https", "/usr/bin/firefox");
This needs Firefox to be invocable by /usr/bin/firefox file or symlink.
However it happens that Thunderbird uses Firefox to open externally linked pictures in html newsletters... So I keep image blocking feature on.
#!/bin/sh # tip for 0.9 version : "-a firefox" option FIREFOX=/usr/local/firefox/firefox #if [ -z "$(ps U $USER | grep $FIREFOX | grep -v "grep")" ] ; then $FIREFOX -a firefox -remote "ping()" 2>&1>/dev/null PING=$? if [ "$PING" -ne "0" ] ; then $FIREFOX "$1" & else $FIREFOX -a firefox -remote openurl\("$1",new-tab\) fi #$FIREFOX -a firefox -remote openurl\("$1",new-tab\) || $FIREFOX "$1" &
#!/bin/sh TB=/usr/local/thunderbird/thunderbird $TB -remote "mailto($1?subject=$2)" || exec $TB -P default \ -compose mailto:$1?subject=$2
Last modified 05.08.2006
