How to setup the default web browser in Kubuntu

Kubuntu is a Ubuntu derived distribution. The only difference between the two is that Kubuntu comes with a KDE desktop environment; while Ubuntu has Gnome. Its just a matter of preference which one you want to use. Anyways; since Kubuntu is KDE based; it comes with its own web browser called “Konqueror”. To be honest I did not give Konqueror that much time to win me over. I am a pretty avid Firefox user and it was one of the first applications I installed. The problem that I ran into was that all our KDE applications were still using Konqueror as their browser. For example; whenever I would click on MSN inbox from Kopete; it would open up in Konqueror. That was pretty annoying to me; so I went about fixing it.

Here is my trial/error approach to try to figure out what setting to change.

1. The first place I looked was in Kopete itself. I went into ‘Settings->Configure’ but could not find any relevant option.
2. Lets look at Firefox itself now. If you look under ‘Edit->Preferences’; there is an option called ‘Default Browser’. Hmm.. this looks like the place I asked ‘Firefox to check if it was the default browser’; but no such check came up.
3. Lets go to the System settings and see if something shows up there. Go to ‘System Settings’ under the KDE menu. Once I got to the “System Settings”; it took me a while to see where to go next. Eventually; I found the relevant option under ‘KDE Components’. Go to ‘Default Applications’; and set up your web browser here. I chose Firefox; and saved the settings. However; this did not affect the earlier behavior. Kopete still launched Konqueror whenever I clicked on a http link.
4. Ok; at this point I was getting frustrated. So I launched Konqueror itself to see if there was any option that I can change there to ‘unset’ it as the default browser. Go to ‘Settings->Configure Konqueror’. Next go to ‘file associations’. This is where it gets a little bit confusing. Look for ‘text’ in the list of file types and expand that. Once you expand it; chose ‘html’. Now you will see that ‘Konqueror’ is listed ‘before’ Firefox. So that was the culprit! I went ahead and moved Firefox up in the list and now Kopete launches Firefox.