Use FireFox in Media Center

I saw an interesting post over on The Green Button where someone said you can add shortcuts to your Media Center program folder for any other program. So I decided to try it out with Firefox and sure enough it works!

Here’s what you need to do: take any shortcut or exe file and put it into your Start Menu | Programs | Accessories | Media Center | Media Center Programs folder:

Now when you select Firefox from within Media Center under More Programs it will start up Firefox and minimize Media Center. (The programs do not run within the Media Center interface) If you have a wireless keyboard and mouse or a really cool remote you can surf the web. To get back to Media Center, just hit the green button and the Media Center interface will come back up again. (Yes, this does still leave Firefox running if you don’t close it) It would be really cool if someone could make a hack so you could get the right icon for your different programs.

This is a feature I’ve been asking for but thought wasn’t available: the ability to launch external programs. It would be even better if it was all done within the Media Center interface but this isn’t too bad of a work around. Here’s a few programs you might want to add:

• ThunderBird
• iTunes
• Office/Open Office
• RSS reader