Running Xubuntu. VERSION="14.04.2 LTS, Trusty Tahr" Which is Ubuntu with the XFCE desktop. In the last couple of days: 1)I installed Google Chrome. 2)Canical has pushed a huge update. 3)Firefox pushed a big update.
And then I noticed that some of my desktop icons were not working. The icons in question are links to various websites (IE: Facebook, Yahoo, mail.com, etc). They are supposed to launch Firefox and feed it a URL. Firefox is then supposed to open that site. Instead it is now just opening the default browser home page. No big problem. But, it is disconcerning.
EDIT: just to clearify: These icons were working up until one of the three actions listed above broke them.

seems like a change in lancher behaviour. you can still write your own script that will execute something like:

and double click it. it is the matter of single line in bash.

Perhaps you can right-click the icons and select properties and fix the links.

Sorry, I should have noted that that was the first thing I tried.

Thanks Yooy. That works.