Firefox and Thunderbird Integration In KDE

Posted on by

You would have thought this was easy, but Googling turned up nothing useful (the KDE pref some people mention is mysteriously absent on my Mandrake 10.0 install) and so it took me half an hour. Here’s the trick:

Firefox: in about:config, set:

network.protocol-handler.expose.mailto=true
network.protocol-handler.app.mailto=/path/to/thunderbird

Thunderbird: install AboutConfig, invoke it, and set:

network.protocol-handler.expose.http=true
network.protocol-handler.app.http=/path/to/firefox

This then pops up a “handle file type” dialog (not sure why) – pick the firefox executable again. This may not be the most efficient way, but it worked for me.

8 thoughts on “Firefox and Thunderbird Integration In KDE”

  1. Gerv,

    That is an incorrect use of the “expose” preferences. Those make the application expose the protocol handler via X-remote. So, your settings attempt to make T-bird be the default http:// handler for your desktop. That isn’t what you want. Likewise, you don’t want Firefox to handle mailto: links.

  3. This probably isn’t too helpful, but in Debian (running under GNOME) it just works. I’m not sure what they did to make it work, but I always found it odd that people had problems getting the two to work together. For me they just “always” (since I’ve been using them) did. Perhaps looking at the Debian packages might give some additional insight.

  4. I looked around for this problem about a month ago. It was for Debian/GNU Linux + KDE. I just changed the following config settings in Thunderbird and Firefox respectively.

    network.protocol-handler.app.http mozilla-firefox
    network.protocol-handler.app.https mozilla-firefox

    network.protocol-handler.app.mailto mozilla-thunderbird

    After these were set, it seems to work allright for both mailto and http(s). As either of them are not KDE applications, this has to be this way. Otherwise, KDE applications can be set to use any available browser/email client by setting the optoin in KDE’s Component Chooser. I was also thinking of tinkering with “discover”, but the problem is solved(for now).

  5. > Thanks Darin. But could elaborate on how to do it correctly? tm.

    I suspect it should be sufficient to simply leave out the “expose” prefs as mentioned by KDS above.

  7. This works, but if firefox is already open, and I click an http link in thunderbird, another instance of firefox is spawned, and I’m asked to choose a user profile. Found a way around this?

  8. since Firefox 1.0 there’s a preference setting called something like “open links from other apps in new tabs instead of new windows”.

    HTH