Steven Yong's Weblog

With some simple steps, we can open link in some of your favorite web browsers, say FireFox, when you're viewing webpage in Internet Explorer. It involves only adding a new entry to your Windows Registry and some basic scripting. Let's do it now.

First, follow this tutorial to add entry to IE context menu. Create a new key, using the text you want displayed in the context menu as the name, for example:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\MenuExt\Open in FireFox

Modify the (default) REG_SZ value to C:\somepath\viewinff.htm (change the somepath to the actual path). Now, add a DWORD value, Contexts under the key we've just created:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\MenuExt\Open in FireFox\Contexts

Then, set the value of Contexts to indicate which contexts your entry should appear in the standard context menu. In this case, I'd like to open a link in FireFox by right-clicking on it, so I give the value 0x20.

You're done with the Registry part, we can now proceed to do some easy scritping in our viewinff.htm:

<SCRIPT>
var shell = new ActiveXObject("WScript.Shell");
shell.run("firefox \"" + external.menuArguments.event.srcElement + "\"");
</SCRIPT>

This piece of script tells the Windows Shell to run firefox.exe with the URL given, let me describe a little about the text external.menuArguments.event.srcElement:

external - Allows access to an additional object model provided by host applications of the Microsoft Internet Explorer browser components

menuArguments - window object where the context menu item was executed

event - the "right-click" action

srcElement - the link we right-click on


All done, enjoy surfing with FireFox!