My son (9) wants to learn a bit of programming - I thought I’d give VB Express (2008) a try - so I downloaded and installed it on his laptop.
A little while after installing it, he tried to go online to play some flash games. He double-clicked on the Firefox shortcut on his desktop and wailed in despair - Microsoft Internet Explorer opened instead. On further examination, the Firefox shortcut doesn’t point to Firefox any more (it did before, as I remember setting it up manually myself), but to a non-application-specific designation of ‘internet’.
So I just deleted the Firefox shortcut and made a new one. When I launched Firefox, it worked, but it said that Firefox was not currently the default browser. This too was easy to remedy.
So… Have I just experienced some sort of exotic glitch here, or is this part of a subtle anti-competitive action on the part of MS.
Your desktop icon was not a link to an executable (no matter how much it looks like one). It is a link to a registry GUID that points to the default browser. I think this happens even if you manually create the icons (as you did).
All that happened was that Visual Express reset the default browser (as you noted) to IE. The desktop icon remains the same, but the application it points to behind the scenes has changes. The icon is cached, so remains the Firefox one.
That certainly sounds more plausible and innocent, however, the desktop shortcut was dragged out of, and copied from the start menu shortcut - the target for that one is “C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe”
I noted that. Its possible that when you change the default browser, desktop shortcuts that point to the previous browser get modified (to the Internet GUID). I’ll have to have a play on a breakable system, if I can find an XP disk. But I have experienced this behaviour in the past, and it is disconcerting to have IE launch from a Firefox icon.
Visual Studio 2008 (not Express) asks you if you want to change your default browser, because client-side debugging of web applications only works with IE. It’s possible that Mangetout overlooked that option when installing Express, or that it was omitted from the UI.
What I find more annoying is Apple hijacking the media file formats every time you update QuickTime for Windows. And Apple and Real Media both re-installing and re-enabling all of their spyware every time you update their products.
