I don’t like to install the likes of Facebook and Twitter apps on my android phone. Preferring instead to just view the web interfaces in Firefox.
I use the sites, but I don’t like the apps. Facebook especially has some pretty “spy-heavy” permissions requirements, and they are generally both fairly bloaty, and don’t offer much advantage over just using the mobile web.
Recently, however, I started to encounter a problem – I don’t know what changed it but, all of a sudden, when I clicked Twitter links sent via email, they seemed to open correctly in Firefox, but then were replaced by this:
Eventually, after googling and finding some similar, but different, issues, I discovered a way to fix it. If you type the following into the URL bar of firefox:
about:config
Then type “Extern” into the search dialog, you will come across the configuration “network.protocol-handler.external-default”. Hit the “Toggle” button to set it to false, like in the picture. Now when you click twitter links they will work correctly in Firefox! 🙂
I have to be honest, and say I don’t really know what this option does. I suspect it means that if websites try to open android apps in future it won’t work, but I’m not sure I want websites to open apps, so that should be OK!
Works for me, thanks.
Thanks very much. Fixed the same issue with eBay links.
… Oddly enough, mine was already true, so I decided to toggle it to false… And it worked… Ebay now doesn’t fully load then flip to that “address wasn’t understood” page.
so thank you.
Thanks for the hint!
A more precise version is to add a new boolean settings to config with name:
network.protocol-handler.external.ebay
And set it to false.
Reference: http://kb.mozillazine.org/Network.protocol-handler.external.%28protocol%29