At some point during the frequent update orgy of my bellowed Ubuntu oneiric I over-updated…

The result was that every time I was attempting to open an URL within Thunderbird, my web browser (firefox) displayed following:

God knows I tried everything (forums, irc, blogs, twitters)… to no avail.

Help came unexpectedly from this thread.

Some dude explained how to change url-handler from firefox to chrome and that’s when it struck me.

Solution

 

I noticed in his post the line “firefox %s”. And was wondering why in my case the url is converted to “%u”. I checked the url-handler configuration of mine by:

$ gconftool-2 -g /desktop/gnome/url-handlers/http/command
firefox %u

and then changed it to:

$ gconftool-2 --type string -s /desktop/gnome/url-handlers/http/command "firefox %s"

Voilà, the problem solved!