Sunday 2 December 2007

Fix for error when opening web pages in Firefox on Windows

Many of you may have come across the "Windows cannot find <url or path to file>" error when opening Internet shortcuts/HTML pages using Firefox as your default browser. Windows will open the link/page fine for you, but will always display this annoying notification if you don't have any previous instances of Firefox running. The error is described here and Mozilla is well aware of it, but it still has not been fixed (as of version 2.0.0.11). Unfortunately, if you perform the fix as suggested on the linked page, you will remove the error temporarily but it will return when the next revision of Firefox gets installed. Until we all get an official fix, I've created a little Powershell script that might be handy to remove the error. Just run it once after each update of Firefox and the irritating message should go away. Administrator privileges should *not* be required since it only changes the registry for the current user.

(Warning: I've only tested the script on Vista, but I'm confident it should work equally well on XP.)