Alright — some of you may know that I’ve had trouble getting links from other applications (such as Skype) to open in Flock instead of Internet Explorer. This is on Windows Vista Home Basic version.
The typical answer is: Make Flock your default browser.
Actions taken:
- When I installed Flock, I set it as default browser
- I also used (in Vista) the Start Menu to go to “default programs” (you should note that there are 2 different things you need to set in “default programs“)
- “Set your default programs”
- “Set a file type or program with a protocol”
In fact, if you go into detail, you can discover a number of things where a particular browser can be chosen for. But let’s not get distracted … Let’s get you up and running as quickly as possible.
The 70,000 Foot View Of The Solution:
The basic solution (and it’s okay if you don’t understand this — I will explain! This is just to let everyone know where we are going — AND, if you’re advanced, you can go ahead and act on the information quickly, without going through a lot of detail.
The solution is this:
At the command-line, you have to run the flock browser with a certain option. Assuming that the computer knows where to find flock, (it’s either on the path, or you are executing the command from where flock exists) the command is
flock.exe -silent -setDefaultBrowser
Generally, it’s not on the path, which means that you would want to find the directory (folder) where flock.exe is located and executed there.
WHEW!
Okay, newbies — still with me?
I’m going to show you what you need to do on Windows Vista to fix the problem.
Let’s go.
So FIRST, you want to open up the start menu
Here are a couple of other options that won’t completely work for you — one is using the control panel:
And the next is, using the “default Program” function — though you can go fairly deep, and it might very well be possible to solve the problem — but it’s … well…messy. So let’s take the easy road!
Now, notice that flock is our default browser, according to Windows:
If we right-click on the “default browser” to pull up the context menu, you’ll notice the options are not very interesting. Selecting “Flock Options” brings up the preferences/options dialog that you find at the bottom of the tools menu:
Because of this, we want to find a “more interesting” version of Flock, using the search function at the bottom of the start menu…with the search, just type in the characters of the file or program you are looking for… Don’t type a carriage return, though! That will close the start menu along with the search and you’ll have to start again!
When the search function (1) finally finds Flock (2), we again right-click on it to bring up a very different context-menu…and we want to select “properties” (3) from the menu…
This brings up the “Flock Properties” window … which is actually a shortcut — which is PERFECT — because that gives us the location of the Flock.exe file…
The arrows show you where the file location is, and also points out the quotes that surround the location (also known as a pathname) — follow the instructions I’ve included in the picture– copy and paste the location:
What i’ve done is opened Wordpad and pasted the command I mentioned at the very beginning of this article. But I was missing the pathname, to make it complete. Now that I have the location (pathname) — Now I just replace the “flock.exe” from above with the pathname…
If you can’t read that — it turns out to be:
“C:\Program Files\Flock\flock\flock.exe” flock.exe -silent -setDefaultBrowser
(Which is the location of the flock browser application (flock.exe) on my computer…it may be somewhere else on yours…so do check!
Now, the next thing to do is use the nifty windows shortcut to bring open the “run” window.
This is done by finding the “windows” key — on my keyboard it’s 2 keys to the left of the space bar and has the “wavy” windows logo (looks like a flag or a banner blowing in the wind.
Holding down the Windows Key and clicking the letter “R” key brings up the run dialog box, that looks like this:
You can see the text box, and all you have to do is paste the command from your wordpad or other text document into the “Run” window, followed by a carriage return…
And that should do it! It surely did solve the problem for me in all but 1 of my applications!
After you do this … check it out on the applications you were having a problem with and see if that doesn’t fix the problem!
Hope this helps you….
Jude Kettenhofen
