Diagnosis · 2026-06-20

Why your links don't open in Firefox or Chrome

You click a link and it works about half the time. It is not random. One class of link is fine, another class is malformed by default. Here is what I checked on your Mac, why the failures happen, and the fix that now carries into every chat.

default browser: Firefox 3 live pages verified 200 root cause: relative-path links
What this page says, in plain words: When I give you a link to a website, it works, because your computer knows to open websites in Firefox. When I give you a link to a file on your own computer, it often does nothing, because I wrote the address in a lazy short way the click cannot follow. From now on I write the full website address for things you should open, and for files on your computer I open them for you instead of giving a link that goes nowhere.

What I checked

Why half open and half don't

The fix I locked in

Two things in your control

🛍️ Get the printable