I’m a big fan of Firefox. So it’s the default browser on every machine I have access to. Unfortunately, Visual Studio 2005 didn’t continue using IE as the default like Visual Studio 2003 did. Even changing the default browser back to IE (yuck) didn’t fix the problem. This morning, I finally googled for a fix.
The steps are these:
- Open any web project.
- Right-click on any aspx page.
- Choose “Browse with …”
- Click on Microsoft Internet Explorer
- Press the “Set as Default” button
Not terribly intuitive, but it works. Here are the top few links Google returned that described this solution:
Somewhere I found the setting that needs to be changed in c:documents and settingsusernamelocal settingsapplication datamicrosoftvisualstudio8.0 in the “browsers.xml” file. So, I created a file for IE and a file for Firefox, then I have two little batch files on my desktop that let me click and “switch” between the two fairly quickly. (Since I have two different projects that target the different browsers specifically.)
the browsers.xml file is self explanatory – just provide a path to firefox or IE.
You could probably key this into a VS.NET macro too if you need to do a lot of switching back and forth.
Thanks for the additional info. I don’t think any of the links I found referred to the specific XML file.