Tag: internet explorer

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Clicking web links in Outlook Express not working [FIX]

 

I was recently asked or help with a problem opening links from emails in Outlook Express. It seemed that clicking web/url links in an email didn’t open the default browser and load the page, it just did nothing.

Fortunately there was an easy fix [for those using Internet Explorer as their default browser at least]:

  1. Click on the Start button in the lower left corner
  2. Near the bottom right of the Start Menu you should see “Run…”, click that
    [This should then bring up a black window with some text in?]
  3. In that window type the following (without the quotation marks)
    1
    "REGSVR32 URLMON.DLL"

    once you have typed the above in hit return key.

  4. A small window should popup saying
    “DLLREGISTERSERVER in urlmon.dll succeeded”
    Click OK in this popup window.
  5. You can now close the black window that opened up after Step 2.
  6. Open Internet Explorer and click on Tools in the top menu and then select Internet Options from the list.
  7. Once it has opened the internet options pages, along the top you should see various tabs, click on the tab called “Programs”
  8. There should be an option in there to check that Internet Explorer is the default browser. If it is ticked, untick it, hit apply then re-tick and hit apply again. If it is not ticked just tick it and hit apply. Either way you need this option ticked but if it’s already ticked you need to untick and then retick it to make sure.
  9. You may also need to click on the “Advanced tab” and see if there is an option to reset internet explorer settings at the bottom, if so click that too and hit ok to close the settings pages.

Now reboot the computer, once rebooted try opening Internet Explorer first and if it prompts you that it is not the default web browser you should click yes to make it default. Next open Outlook Express and see if that has solved the problem with the links in emails.

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Create shortcut to open URL in non-default browser

If like me you have Firefox set as your default browser in Windows XP but need to create a desktop shortcut to a web page but force it to open in Internet explorer or any other non-default browser there are two methods to achive this:

Method 1 – Create from Scratch

Right click on the desktop and select New -> Shortcut:

You will then be asked for the location of the item for the shortcut. Ordinarily you would just type http://the_url_you_want/ here but that would cause the page to open in your system’s default browser which is not what you want. Instead, copy and paste one of the following depending which browser you want to force the shortcut to open in:

To force open a URL in Internet Explorer:
“C:\Program Files\Internet Explorer\iexplore.exe” http://url_you_want

To force open a URL in Firefox:
“C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe” http://url_you_want

After copying the blue text above you simply past that into the item location field, replacing the “url_you_want” with your chosen url. For example, if you had firefox set as your default browser but wanted to have a shortcut to http://blog.scoopz.com/ that always opened in Internet Explorer it would look like:

"C:\Program Files\Internet Explorer\iexplore.exe" http://blog.scoopz.com

Method 2 – Modify a shortcut to the browser

What if you want to open in a browser other than IE or Firefox (Opera or Safari, etc). You can acieve the same result as Method 1 by first creating a shortcut to the browser program itself and then modifying this shortcut to include the URL or web page you want.

Click on Start, Programs and find the browser you wish to use. Click and drag the icon for the browser to the desktop from the Programs menu whilst holding down the CTRL key.

You should now have a shortcut to the browser on your desktop. In this example I have chosen Internet Explorer (see icon to the left).

Next right click on the shortcut you just created and select properties from the popup menu. This should then load the shortcut’s properties page.

All you need to do now is click on the target field in the properties page and scroll to the very end (or hit the End Key on the keyboard). You now need to type the URL that you wish to open at the end of this field, in the example to the right I have chosen http://blog.scoopz.com and appended this to the end of the target. Leave all the other settings the same for now and that’s the new shortcut done.

From this shortcut page you can easily choose a Shortcut Key combination (CTRL+ALT+B, etc) to launch your shortcut instantly and choose whether to open the web page in a maximised, minimised or normal sized window.

UPDATE Jan 2010 – As several users have pointed out in the comments, the above techniques do not work if you are running Vista or Windows 7 as the path to internet explorer EXE file has changed. In this case or if you want to apply the above to other browsers here’s what Xygris recommends:

For those with other browsers, different operating systems or just updated versions with different paths try just copying the shortcut from your start menu to your desktop (via drag & drop) and them appending the new shortcut with the URL.

Thanks for the heads up Xygris.