I have been a Google Chrome user for a while now, and I have two different ‘Users’ in Chrome. The default user is my personal account, and then I have a work account. For my personal email I use a Google Apps Gmail account and just check my email with Chrome. I use Thunderbird to check my work email. For a while now I have had an issue where I click a link from Thunderbird and it tries to open in my default Chrome user. This doesn’t work very well as I am not logged into most of my work accounts on my personal user. This drove me nuts! Now I have to copy and paste the URL into the work user Chrome window. After a little Googling tonight, I was able to setup Thunderbird to open URLs in my work user Chrome browser. Life is much better now! To do this, I had to add two lines to prefs.js. On Ubuntu 13.04, prefs.js is located at ~/.thunderbird/ /prefs.js where is what appears to be a random set of numbers/letters followed by .default.

The two lines I added are:

user_pref(“network.protocol-handler.app.http”, “/opt/google/chrome/google-chrome –profile-directory=’Profile 1′”);
user_pref(“network.protocol-handler.app.https”, “/opt/google/chrome/google-chrome –profile-directory=’Profile 1′”);

If the profile-directory for the Chrome user you are wanting the links to open in is different than what I have, you may need to edit the directory name. This worked for me on Raring (what will become Ubuntu 13.04) with Thunderbird 17.0.4.

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