Yahoo! MessengerOkay, okay. I know I’ve been a critic of Windows Vista and you might be wondering why the heck I’m writing Vista tips. I’ve recently acquired for myself a laptop and it came with a free Windows Vista Home Basic OS. Since I figured I’m still paying for it (even if they say it’s free), I might just use it and get a first-hand Vista (horror?) experience out of it. Vista Home Basic doesn’t have Aero and I also figured I don’t need that much of a fancy interface anyway. In any case, I’ve set my system settings to work for performance over appearance, so that’s that.

In any case, one of the immediate pet peeves I encountered is that my Yahoo! Messenger is using Internet Explorer as its default browser. That is even if I’ve set Firefox to be my default browser. So whenever I click on links in Yahoo! Messenger windows, darned IE just keeps popping up. And, in case you might not know, Yahoo! Messenger uses IE as it’s backbone.

A little exploration in Vista’s labyrinth of options and menus led me to this solution.

  • Click the Start menu
  • Click Default Programs
  • Click “Set program access and computer deaults”
  • Select Custom then click on the drop arrow
  • Look for “Choose a default web browser” and select Mozilla Firefox
    Select Firefox as default browser in Vista
  • Click OK

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