Office hyperlink behaviour

'lo

I noticed that with Office 2002, Ctrl+Clicking on a hyperlink in a document opened it in your default browser (in my case, Firefox), but with Word 2003, even though Firefox is set as my default browser everywhere, Word keeps on opening links in IE.

Can someone explain this behaviour please?

The *.url file format is handled by the "Shell Doc Object and Control" DLL. When I open *.url files on my PC, Firefox boots.

Word's behaviour doesn't mirror Outlook, which correctly opens links in Firefox.

The file associations for *.url do not come in to play here as we are not talking about a file. It is a hyperlink embedded within the document. That is why I recommended that you alter those two specific file types which are not related to any particular file extension.

oykica wrote:

The file associations for *.url do not come in to play here as we are not talking about a file. It is a hyperlink embedded within the document. That is why I recommended that you alter those two specific file types which are not related to any particular file extension.

That's weird. Is it missing the -url "%1" parameter that is passed into firefox.exe for the application used to perform the action? That shouldn't make a difference because you can execute firefox.exe channel9.msdn.com from the Run window without any problem but it might be worth a try. Is DDE configured for those associations?

I can change the URL:HyperText Transfer Protocol file association and make the hyperlink from Word 2003 open in either IE or Firefox depending on which one I have configured. The configuration I noted at the start of this thread was how Firefox had configured them either immediately after installation or after I allowed it to become the default browser when prompted on the first start up. After setting the file association to IE, to test that I had the correct one, I used those exact same default settings when changing it back to Firefox. It then continued to work in Firefox as before.

Try looking at your file associations. You have some that exist for the (NONE) extension that relate to actions such as clicking a hyperlink.

Round up these two particular suspects.

URL:HyperText Transfer Protocol
URL:HyperText Transfer Protocol with Privacy

Then set them up like this.

Action: open
Application used to perform action: C:\PROGRA~1\MOZILL~1\FIREFOX.EXE -url "%1"

You might as well configure them for DDE while you are there.

Use DDE: Yup
DDE Message: "%1",,0,0,,,,
Application: Firefox
DDE Application Not Running:
Topic: WWW_OpenURL

I hope that does the trick. Good to see that you are a fan of the fox!

No big deal, I'm due for a reformat in a few days.

And I'll install OpenOfficeOrg, muwhahahahaha

W3bbo wrote:

No big deal, I'm due for a reformat in a few days.

And I'll install OpenOfficeOrg, muwhahahahaha

I filed a bug against similar behavior when launching URLs from OneNote. Here's the explanation I got:

When Maxthon register as the default browser it changes the following registry key:
HKCR\htmlfile\shell\(Default) -> Maxthon
HKCR\htmlfile\shell\open\command\(Default) -> "<full_path>\Maxthon" "%1"
and more. This is enough to get ShellExecute to launch the correct browser.
However, hyperlink navigation in most of Office uses HLINK.dll and URLMON.dll to create and bind to an URL Moniker. The logic inside URLMON is to look for the CLSID associated with HKCR\htmlfile. Because Maxthon reuses the HKCR\htmlfile registry key and only changes a couple subkey, the HKCR\htmlfile\CLSID points to mshtml.dll (InProcServer32), class mshtml.HTMLDocumentClass from the IE registration. And this is why IE is launched instead of the Maxthon browser.
This is a Maxthon bug