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Bug 356010

Summary:	Help->Help Contents errors out with "Syntax Error: Unknown command 'http://127.0.0.1:42170/help/index.jsp'"
Product:	[Eclipse Project] Platform	Reporter:	Greg Sherrod <rkk_529>
Component:	User Assistance	Assignee:	platform-ua-inbox <platform-ua-inbox>
Status:	CLOSED WONTFIX	QA Contact:
Severity:	normal
Priority:	P3	CC:	Martin.vGagern, stephen.francisco
Version:	4.2
Target Milestone:	---
Hardware:	PC
OS:	Linux
Whiteboard:	stalebug

Description Greg Sherrod

2011-08-27 17:48:12 EDT

Build Identifier: I20110613-1736

This was a brand new installation of Eclipse Indigo, classic edition.

It was run on a 64 bit Linux machine, under Slackware 13.1  Uname -a gives:
Linux nebula 2.6.33.4 #3 SMP Wed May 12 23:13:09 CDT 2010 x86_64 Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Quad  CPU   Q8200  @ 2.33GHz GenuineIntel GNU/Linux



Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.Install Eclipse.
2.Click Help->Help Contents
3.

Comment 1 Steve Francisco

2011-11-16 09:18:18 EST

Under preferences, enter "browser" in the filter and you should see 2 choices:
1) general/web browser - select "use external browser" and make sure a valid system web browser is specified (like Firefox)
2) help - under "Open help contents" select "in external browser"

Does that allow you to open Help?

Comment 2 Martin von Gagern

2013-01-17 03:56:02 EST

Same here, for a fresh install of Juno 4.2.1. Clicking on links for search results has the same effect. The fact that this gives no feedback at all via the user intferace, and people have to look at process output, is pretty nasty. Particularly in terms of first user experience. I don't know how eclipse tries to determine the system default browser on Linux, but apparently it is not via the $BROWSER environment variable. It also looks as if the supposed command name were simply an empty string in this case, which should be easy to detect and report to the user via some nicer mechanism.

Manually changing the browser from system default to firefox did solve the problem for me.

Comment 3 Lars Vogel

2019-11-27 07:27:15 EST

This bug hasn't had any activity in quite some time. Maybe the problem got
resolved, was a duplicate of something else, or became less pressing for some
reason - or maybe it's still relevant but just hasn't been looked at yet.

If you have further information on the current state of the bug, please add it.
The information can be, for example, that the problem still occurs, that you
still want the feature, that more information is needed, or that the bug is
(for whatever reason) no longer relevant.

If the bug is still relevant, please remove the stalebug whiteboard tag.