how tell Thunderbird to open links in a certain Firefox instance?

Question

I'm using Firefox and Thunderbird profiles for different activities and have them running as separated instances (processes) on different virtual desktops.

This works great in general. But a big issue is that I can't directly open links from mails. I just get the message "Firefox is already running, but is not responding..."

Is there a way to configure the url handler such that it will open the site in a Firefox instance with a certain profile? I already tried to set the preference network.protocol-handler.app.http to /usr/bin/firefox -P myprofile , but that didn't change anything.

Answer 1

I found a fix at the link below. The additional instructions in comment #4 were necessary for me and hopefully will make it work for you.

http://hsmak.wordpress.com/2009/09/03/howto-force-thunderbird-to-open-links-in-firefox/

Answer 2

Was looking for the answer to this and eventually found the following working solution:

In thunderbird set network.protocol-handler.warn-external.http (and network.protocol-handler.warn-external.https and network.protocol-handler.warn-external.ftp) to true. This causes Thunderbird to ask for an application when you try to open a link.

For the URL handler, instead of calling firefox directly, use a script where MOZ_NO_REMOTE is unset, e.g.

#!/bin/sh
unset MOZ_NO_REMOTE
exec /usr/bin/firefox $1

(from http://forums-test.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=39&t=756575&start=0)