As usual, my upgrade to F9 brought with it some behind-the-scenes changes.  Sometimes these lurk for quite a while before I discover them.

Tonight I clicked on a “mailto:” URL.  A while back I had configured firefox to open a new message buffer in Emacs when I did this; but to my surprise instead it launched evolution.

I wasted a lot of time trying to see what I did wrong in my firefox config (which is amazingly obscure, by the way, for something that seems like a basic configuration tweak).  The answer: nothing was wrong.  Instead, now I must also configure Gnome to know how to do this.

This meant a short side trip to install gconf-editor… as with seahorse, I was surprised to find out that a generally useful tool like this was not already installed for me.

After successfully editing the proper key, it turns out that “mailto:” is actually handled by the “Mail Reader” in “Preferred Applications” — something I would not have guessed, given that I am trying to send mail.  I guess I read that a bit too literally.  (The tip from the title: just edit this and save yourself a lot of time.)

I’m not even sure where all these little changes get made.  Was it a Gnome change?  A firefox change?  And integration patch from Fedora?  I couldn’t say.  Over time, these little annoyances do add up and leave a bad impression.

Off the top of my head, I don’t have a good idea for how Gnome, or whoever, should solve this kind of problem.  I just felt like venting a bit.