Testing my Flex apps, especially using the debug mode, in Firefox is a big problem. The app opens in a new tab in Firefox but sometimes bad things happen and it crashes the browser.

Firefox isn’t the quickest starting browser out there especially if you’re like me and have lots of persistent tabs automatically open.

But just because Firefox is default browser on my computer doesn’t mean it has to be me default browser for Eclipse/FlexBuilder. I can easily change it to IE so that I can run my apps. And there’s a little added bonus: when you kill a debug session from the debug panel IE automatically closes. With Firefox I always had to kill the debug session and then close the tab. And with the browser one monitor and the debug panel on the far monitor - of a three monitor system - that’s a lot of mouse tracking. ( Yeah, yeah, poor me. I hear you. )

To make IE your default browser for running your Flex apps go: Window > Preferences… Now open the General menu and select Web Browser. Now you can just check off which browser you want to use.

Another added bonus is that I can use the regular old public Flash player in Firefox and only install the debug Flash player for IE. That way I don’t get all the Flex error messages popping up on . . . well, I won’t tell you who’s site they pop up on all the time. But you know who you are. ;-)