Moving the Curve

I signed up for Twitter way back in the day when picking a short name (smd) was important because most people I knew were still using it for the intended SMS purpose. Like so many other new services, I more or less forgot about it, occasionally checking back when someone mentioned it.

In the past week, I caught Tweet fever (I blame avflox‘s livejournal post) and have seriously been experimenting with Twitter again. Naturally the web interface wasn’t interactive enough for me, so I started experimenting with clients. Many people have been recommending twhirl so I gave it a try.¹

Overall, twhirl is quite nice, although I find myself constantly accidentally exiting by clicking the ‘x’ on my client. Since twhirl appears in my system tray, I expect closing the window to minimize it to the system tray, not completely exit the program.

That aside, my biggest annoyance was that when I clicked a URL in a tweet, it was opening up in IE instead of Firefox, my default browser. I found reference on the twhirl site to how to fix this issue in Vista, but no posts or comments about this being an issue in XP.

I had Firefox check, and it believed it was the default browser. IE knows it’s not the default browser. When I click URLs in Outlook, they open in Firefox.

I went to Control Panel > Add or Remove Programs > Set Program Access and Defaults > Custom and saw that while “Use my current Web Browser” was select as the default, Firefox didn’t appear on the list. Just IE and Safari. As an experiment, I chose Safari, went to twhirl, clicked a URL, and sure enough, it opened in Safari.

So I reinstalled Firefox, went back to the control panel, and saw that Firefox was now an option. I selected it, clicked ok, and clicked another URL in twhirl. Finally, success.
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[1] must. resist. obvious. rhyme.

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Tags: default browser | firefox | twhirl | twitter | xp

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