Lotus Notes and URLs not Opening in the Default OS Browser

I have Google Chrome installed on my work laptop. I had to as a few things don’t work properly in Internet Explorer 9 yet.

Anyway, somewhere along the way Chrome became the OS default browser. I didn’t want that, so I change the default in “Default Programs” in Windows 7. The trouble was, the one application (Lotus Notes 8.5.2) that I needed to have open IE by default wasn’t. It wouldn’t let go of Chrome.

I reflected on this. It could be a philosophical stand by IBM against Microsoft, but this seems somehow an unlikely and obscure venue for battle.

Instead it turns out to be a bit of bad programming that points to some Registry Entries that don’t get updated when you change your defult browser. It took me a long time to fins the answer, but find it I did.

IBM described it here. In short, you need to:

Manually modify the following registry keys to remove Chrome and
point it to
iexplore.exe:

HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\http\shell\open\command\
HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\https\shell\open\command\

HKCU\Software\Classes\http\shell\open\command\
HKCU\Software\Classes\https\shell\open\command\

… and from there you should be golden. If you want to change your browser to Firefox or back to Chrome I imagine you’ll have to edit those entries again. When I edited my registry (and you will make backups, won’t you?) only two of the four entries had to be changed.

Enjoy!

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