nope. didn't work. I tried the stuff from the Mepis community forum. I do believe that setting the FF preference to 'make this my default browser' is what started the problem. Here's another example of the messup. I open Gnome Terminal. I type:
Then I press return. Then with the mouse I hover over the text with the url and right click. Then I select 'Open Link'. What should happen is some browser is opened with the
www.google.com page in it. What does happen is that I get a browser window, but nothing in it. (this is the same behavior as with icedove... a FF window with nothing in it.)
What I've tried:
I set up update alternatives with my version of FF in it, so that if you type 'x-www-browser
http://www.google.com' from the command line, a FF window pops up with the google page in it. This works. I also use x-www-browser in my 'preferred applications' setting. I am also using testing and xfce4. At this point I'm kinda despairing, thinking there's no solution to my problem. I have a laptop with the same xfce4 and wheezy and it doesn't have this problem. On the laptop I never made the mistake of using FF to set the default browser.