Every once in a while most of us come across some sort of odd behavior in our software that bothers us because we can’t figure it out. If you’re like me, these problems nag at you until you are finally compelled to fix them.

Firefox 0.9x bug
While there are a number of improvements in Firefox 0.9x series of browsers, I’ve also found there are several new bugs as well. The one that’s been annoying me the most is tied to the Firefox installation and how it integrates itself into windows. Windows tries to open a new instance every time you click on a link, and because something’s messed up, you get 2 windows and an error message. The problem lies in the fact that Firefox doesn’t clear out Internet Explorer’s DDE information when it’s set as the default browser. I put the error messages it was generating into Google and found a reference on Jon Galloway’s blog. This and another link on his page sparked my memory of messing around with DDE settings back in Windows 3.1 and I remembered all you generally need is the “%1” in the ‘DDE Message’ field for the particular file type you are trying to correct the behavior for. For Firefox, this means going to an explorer window, clicking “tools,” “folder options,” “file types” and then editing the properties for “(NONE) URL:HyperText Transfer Protocol” and the following entry “…with Privacy”. Delete everything but the “%1” (keep the quotation marks) in the ‘DDE Message’ field and everything should work normally. Phew.. glad to have that fixed. 🙂