sides of march (Brian DeMarzo)

I recently purchased a new laptop (an experience I’ll talk about another time) and got a new desktop at work, so I had the pleasure of re-installing Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 twice in the past two months. (The service pack install was faster, thanks to this tip.) Everything seemed fine, except for one thing: I couldn’t get Visual Studio to recognize Firefox as my default browser, which meant every time I started a web project (debugging or not), Internet Explorer would rear its ugly head.

The solution was not to change the Windows default browser (it was already IE) or to set some crazy start action on your web project. It’s more obscure. In VS, go to File / Browse With, add a new browser that points to Firefox, then set that as the default.

OK, it does make sense on some levels, and maybe it’s good that VS can have a different default browser than Windows, but shouldn’t that option be in the Tools / Options window, perhaps under the Environment section, which already has a Web Browser group?

At least I figured it out without breaking (another) mouse.