External links in Visual Studio 2012 do not work on Windows 8

Question

I am running Visual Studio 2012 on Windows 8 and links to external pages (e.g. the More Information links shown in the NuGet Package Manager) are not opened. How can I fix this? By the way, my default browser is Google Chrome.

Answer 1

The problem is a very specific one that only occurs when you run VS2012 as an administrator and you have Google Chrome set as your default browser. The problem is that Google Chrome failed to register itself as the default browser for administrator users. You can confirm this by doing the following:

1. Start an admin command prompt (or any admin app that launches a browser)
2. type start http://cnn.com
3. FAIL. Class not registered.

The issue has been registered at: http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=156400

It also lists the solution, which is to re-install Google Chrome using the Developer Channel (go to: https://www.google.com/intl/en/chrome/browser/index.html?extra=devchannel#eula). This will re-register Google Chrome as the default browser, but now it will also work for admin users. After installation has been successful, you can verify that everything is working fine again by running the first two steps again. Step three should be that Google Chrome opens with http://cnn.com.

You can now re-install Google Chrome using the regular branch again: https://www.google.com/intl/en/chrome/browser/