No http handler under linux by default

I found that the http protocol was not set up with a handler under linux. Its possible that with a more recent version of GNOME this would 'just work', however I used the following trick (similar to the mailto: protocol handler in MozillaFirefoxNotes)

Note, that I use MozillaFirefox as my browser, so its this that I wish to set up as the handler for http:

First of all, I created a handler script to run firefox. It can be found at http://www.wlug.org.nz/archive/firefox-helper.sh

I put this under /bin, made it executable, and tested it with '/bin/firefox-helper.sh http://www.wlug.org.nz/' - the wlug homepage opens in a new tab.

I then added the following entry to my prefs.js under my thunderbird profile dir:

user_pref("network.protocol-handler.app.http", "/home/dhtrl1/bin/firefox-helper.sh");

and restarted thunderbird