Real Dimensions

While developing web sites and applications I primarily use Firefox, but I don’t have Firefox set as my default browser. I do this for an important reason, by leaving IE as my default browser I often just double click on files to view them and they open in IE. This reminds me (forces me) to test my pages in IE.

However, there are many occasions where I really just want to view the link or file in Firefox so having a right click context menu item to allow this would be great., and here is how you can make one.

Just be careful, this is a registry hack!!!

Open a text file, I use notepad, and add the code below to it;

REGEDIT4

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOTInternetShortcutshellFoxOpen]

@=”Open with Firefox”

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOTInternetShortcutshellFoxOpencommand]

@=”\”C:Program FilesMozilla Firefoxfirefox.exe\”\”%l\”"

If you did a custom install of Firefox you will have to change the last line to the location of your firefox.exe file. Make sure you use the double slashes as I have. Now save the file as “FFopen.reg” and double click on it, click OK on the pop up and you’re all set. If the file just opens and you see the text you entered then the file extension was not changed to .reg and is still .txt. Try saving the file again and this time include the quotes “FFopen.reg”, this will force notepad to save it as you named it and not FFOpen.reg.txt.

Now when you right click you should see an extra menu item that says “Open with Firefox”

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 5th, 2006 at 9:28 am and is filed under Random, Web Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.