I agree. mailto: links firing Thunderbird for people who don't use it is so not cool.

Actually, I think the mailto: protocol has a lot of potential but has been mostly neglected by browsers. Only recently did Chrome announce the support for using gmail as an alternative for opening mailto: links.

Anyway, I decided to do something about it and cooked up a small snippet [1] that opens up a modal window every time a user clicks on a mailto link and lets him send a mail via MailerJS [2]. Just paste the snippet in your web page and skadooosh, all mailto: links get so much more awesome!

Might also write a Firefox extension that enables using gmail for mailto: links when I get some time.

[1]: https://github.com/creatorrr/Snippets/blob/master/mailtofix....

[2]: http://mailerjs.com/