I just got a new laptop, and of course it's loaded with vista. Everything works awesomly! (my last PC was from 2001, BIG DIFF.) But the damned thing compulsivly and automatically sets Internet Explorer to my default browser and won't let me change certain things which browsers will typically handle.

've manually changed it so Firefox handles all the stuff except HTTPS and what not (CANNOT CHANGE W/O HACK!), but IE just bumps in every time I want to click a link from a non-browser based file any help on how to change the settings?

i haven't tried vista (i'm stuck with windows XP), but there is an option in firefox to set it as the default browser on startup. have you tried that yet? just open firefox and go to TOOLS > OPTIONS > MAIN and tick the mark/box for SYSTEM DEFAULTS (at the bottom part) to enable firefox as default browser. hope it works for you.

yeah I know about that. Vista just switches it back instantly, it's pretty lame I'm pretty handy about getting around things (without any windows coding knowledge) but this one require something I don't have

Hmm. I never have that problem. In fact, it works the other way around. Whenever Messenger tries to open a link in IE, a Firefox window opens instead!

I think you'll need to change the registry here.

Go to Start\Default Programs and go to "Set your Default programs". Select "Firefox" and select "set program as Default". If that's what you did and it changed back, you're probably going to need to change the registry. (I don't exactly know how, but try going to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows and see if you can find anything.

EDIT: AHH, what am I doing? sorry, it's "current", not "local".

This post has been edited by tricky77puzzle: Feb 14 2008, 09:33 PM

Well if you check out the mozilla website about this problem it seems that it is a bug in both firefox and with Vista as well. However, this website claims to have figured it out, and this website has another trick as well in over coming the vista firefox problem.