I use Safari’s (and Dashboard’s) Web Clip feature to keep a track of latest news on Rediff.com. The red arrow in the screenshot below points to Rediff’s main headline section, which I use as a Web Clip.

Clicking on a link in a Web Clip, usually opens a new Safari window with that link. I had a weird thing happen to me after installing the iPhone SDK and the recent Mac OS 10.5.5 update. The links would try and launch Mobile Safari that comes with iPhone SDK’s iPhone emulator, which would crash immediately with the message: “The application MobileSafari quit unexpectedly.”

The same thing then started happening to hyperlinks in my e-mails. It then occurred to me that somehow, my default browser had been set to Mobile Safari. All I had to do was go to Safari’s Preferences dialog and change it to something more reasonable (Safari, Firefox or Opera) and things were fine again.

Minor rant - I find it ironical that to change your default browser, you have to go through the preference pane of another browser (which thereby acts a gatekeeper for other browsers on your system). I think this setting should be a part of the System Preferences pane.

This entry was posted Sunday, October 5th, 2008 at 10:43 pm and is filed under Browser, OS, Software, Tips. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.