How to set Firefox as the Default Browser in Windows 7 when it is Missing from the Default Programs List
Recently I was on a Windows 7 computer with Chrome and IE installed. I’ve been using Firefox since it came out and haven’t transitioned to Chrome like everyone else has. I installed the most recent version, 38.0.1, and it installed to my profile folder because I ran without administrator privileges. I was surprised when I was unable to set Firefox as the default browser to use when clicking links.
- Firefox popped up with a message on startup that it is not the default browser, but clicking the button to make it the default browser had no effect.
- Firefox has a button under Tools -> Options -> General to make it the default browser, but that had no effect either.
- In Control Panel -> All Control Panel Items -> Default Programs -> Set Default Programs, Firefox did not appear as a selectable program, although IE and Chrome did.
My best guess is that Firefox being missing from the Default Program list was due to it being installed as a limited user without administrator rights. However, I was able to modify the registry to overcome this problem. The registry key is HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Shell\Associations\UrlAssociations. There are subkeys for http and https. Each of these keys has another subkey named UserChoice. Within each of these is the value Progid. The values were set to ChromeHTML and I changed them to FirefoxURL. This immediately did the trick.
Now I am happily puttering along in Firefox and Firebug while everyone else in the known universe is browsing and debugging in Chrome.
