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Monday, December 28, 2009

I remapped iexplore to lauch firefox

If there is a task that can be launched exclusively with the keyboard without mouse interaction, I'm all over it.

For me, this means lauching the browser (aka Internet Explorer) by pressing the Start button > followed by "r" for Run > followed by "iexplore www.address.com"

"iexplore" magically launches Internet Explorer.

So now that I'm a full blown Firefox convert, I needed a mechanism to launch firefox even though I typed in due to bad habit "iexplore".

I tried various bat files, then finally stumbled across the registry change that maps "iexplore" to Internet Explorer :-


[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\App Paths\IEXPLORE.EXE]
@="C:\\Program Files\\Internet Explorer\\iexplore.exe"
"Path"="C:\\Program Files\\Internet Explorer;"


All I had to do then was modify this entry to point to firefox :-


[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\App Paths\IEXPLORE.EXE]
@="C:\\Program Files\\Mozilla Firefox\\firefox.exe"
"Path"="C:\\Program Files\\Mozilla Firefox;"

Now I can continue to use iexplore but launch firefox instead!