Just a quickie. While you can change gen­eral sys­tem set­tings for your default browser sys­temwide in Linux (Ubuntu) by going to System -> Preferences -> Preferred Applications, this does not affect how TweetDeck behaves when load­ing URLs.

I’ve been using Epiphany because of my somewhat-​​laggy net­book, so hav­ing Firefox load when­ever I used TweetDeck was get­ting old.

Searching the Ubuntu forums brought up the issue of mod­i­fy­ing some set­tings files for Adobe AIR, but I dis­cov­ered some­thing inter­est­ing while inves­ti­gat­ing the /​opt direc­tory, which is where AIR and TweetDeck get installed. I did that because solu­tions I’d seen described alter­ing a .so file to point to a dif­fer­ent browser, but it was tetchy and could be destroyed with some­thing as sim­ple as a Flash or AIR upgrade.

I found an eas­ier way to do this, I think, one that works for me any­way. NOTE that you need to do this with root privs (sudo).

When I looked into the /​opt direc­tory, I saw that there were three fold­ers there — one for Adobe AIR, one for TweetDeck, and one for fire­fox. (The fire­fox direc­tory was not a sym­link. This is mar­gin­ally trou­bling and might explain why upgrad­ing your sys­tem to Ffox3.5 isn’t rec­og­nized by TweetDeck, and it still loads Ffox3.)

TweetDeck seems to be hard­wired to load /​opt/​firefox/​firefox when open­ing a URL. But it doesn’t actu­ally seem to care if it’s really Firefox it loads or not.

Here’s the short­ened ver­sion of what I did. About half of it was guess­work and trial-​​and-​​error, but it worked.

1. In /​opt, rename the fire­fox direc­tory to some­thing like ffox.
2. Create a new direc­tory in /​opt called fire­fox.
3. Copy the script or sym­link to the browser of your choice into the fire­fox folder you just cre­ated.
4. Rename that script or sym­link fire­fox.

After that, TweetDeck should use the browser you want.

UPDATE: I did have to alter the epiphany (“fire­fox”) script so it would load new con­tent in tabbed ses­sions in the browser, assum­ing it was already run­ning. I com­mented out the orig­i­nal line (exec epiphany-​​browser “$@”) and added the new-​​tab com­mand. The revised script looks like this:

#! /​bin/​sh

#exec epiphany-​​browser “$@“
exec epiphany-​​browser –new-​​tab “$@”

Of course if you’re using a dif­fer­ent browser, your script­ing (and mileage) may vary.

This also bodes well for those who want to use Firefox, but the cur­rent ver­sion, not the one that ships (for some bizarre rea­son) with AIR. Just make a sym­link to your fire­fox install in /​opt, and you should have the cor­rect, cur­rent ver­sion load.

UPDATE 2: Apparently not all users have an install of fire­fox in /​opt. So this might not do the trick for you after all, though I guess you could still give it a try and see what happens.