Google Chrome browser
Installing Chrome or Firefox beta may cause hyperlinks in Outlook to stop working
After I installed the Google Chrome 6 browser, hyperlinks stopped working in Outlook 2010. You can only imagine how frustrating it is to not be able to click the links in email and have the browser find the page.
This is a known issue with Chrome. There are dozens of pages of help tips under the search “hyperlinks not working”.
The actual error messages are “General failure. The URL was “(insert URL)”. Application not found” or “Error launching browser”
The suggested fixes are to uninstall Firefox of Google Chrome and reset Internet Explorer 8 as the default browser. This suggestion worked for some people but not everyone.
There are several other suggestions on the web to get Outlook working again. I don’t endorse any of them since they didn’t work for me. The ultimate fix is to uninstall Office, Firefox and Chrome and install Office again.
All of the suggested fixes take considerable time. No doubt we will regret playing with beta code and learn once again it is dangerous.
Update – the problem is apparently with Google Chrome although they blame Microsoft. After two days of tweaking the registry file, un-installing and re-installing Office, Firefox, IE and Windows 7 the problem persists. Next weekend I will have to re-install Windows 7 from a fresh copy. Many people are quite irritated with Google over this.
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