Since a few days I’ve been experiencing a very (and i can’t stress the very word enough) annoying problem. As webdesigner I have 4 webbrowsers installed and a few standalone versions of Internet Explorer. More recently I also added the IE 7 beta as a standalone exe to the list. From that moment on IE 6 started to behave strangely.
When I typed an URL in the address bar and hit enter, all of a sudden firefox launched and loaded the website I requested. Now normally I wouldn’t mind Firefox imposing itself over Internet Explorer but I want to test my websites in all browsers on my computer, not just a few of them. The odd think was that links clicked in a website didn’t act similar, they just launched normally in IE or in a new IE window.
After some latenight searching on Google I couldn’t come up with a solutions so I resorted to using my little server for testing websites in IE. Of course this wasn’t a long term solutions so last night I started searching for a solution again and guess what? IE 7 messed up!Because I didn’t install IE 7 in the normal way but hacked my way through it to run it alongside IE 6 some registry keys were entered wrong. This caused IE to launch all pages from the addressbar in Firefox. This seems to be an issue known to the IE dev team so they were kind enough to offer us the simple solution: delete a regkey.
They also stressed we should be installing the IE 7 beta the normal way. Yea right, if I’d be able to uninstall it as simply as it was installing it I would probably do so but I’m not going to install a beta product to replace a … erm … functional version. Certainly not since explorer acts as the backbone of the Windows GUI. Damn you Microsoft, do you really think I’m stupid.
Not installing IE 7 the proper way was own stupid fault, yes … but that won’t keep me from running IE 7 and IE 6 side by side. If the issue pops up again I know what to do!
Thanks for the tip ondeleting the regkey! I’d noticed the exact same problem after installing IE7 alongside IE6 on my testing machine, and ended up removing it for the time being until I found a workaround…
Hello! I also have another solution to the firefox/IE 7 problem. This fix is suppose to be for IE 6, but it infact does work with IE7 aswell.
Start > Run > explorer
Tools > Folder options > File types tab >
find “(NONE) URL:HyperText Transfer Protocol” > Advanced > and under Actions, choose open, and click Edit…
Then, fill out the boxes like this:
Action: open
Application used to perform action: “C:\Program Files\Internet Explorer\iexplore.exe” -nohome
[x] Use DDE
DDE message: “%1″,,-1,0,,,,
Application: IExplore
DDE Application Not Running:
Topic: WWW_OpenURL
Forgot something aswell, there is one last step:
Then go into IE, Tools > Internet Options > Programs tab > Reset Web Settings > Yes. If you want Firefox to be the default browser, open Firefox and set it as the default.