IBM Launchpad Will Not Start: Unable to find supported browser

I encountered this issue when attempting to start the launchpad to start an IBM WebSphere Portal 8 installation via the IBM installation manager - took me a while to sort out, so hopefully this write-up will save someone else some time!

When trying to fire up the IBM Launchpad application via the Setup.sh command on a system where Mozilla Firefox 17+ is configured as the default browser, you may receive an error message in your browser:

Unable to find supported browser

An error occurred while starting the launchpad. This error typically occurs when the launchpad is unable to find a supported browser. Check your product's documentation for a list of supported browsers.
NOTE: This file is a place holder for product specific instructions about how to recover from this error.
You should describe the location of installation programs on the product CD so the user can run them directly without starting launchpad if necessary.
Procedure for correcting the error that is preventing the launchpad from displaying
==============================================================
The launchpad supports the following browsers:
o Mozilla
o Firefox
o Internet Explorer (Microsoft Windows platforms only)
o SeaMonkey

With a little digging, you'll discover that the whichBrowser variable in launchpad\browser.sh script (called by Setup.sh) is actually being set correctly, and that your browser is being opened with the following, valid command:

/usr/bin/firefox -P Profile_2883 -profile /tmp/IBM_LaunchPad_2883/Profile_2883 file:///media/sf_websphere_media/media_80/wp_package/Setup/launchpad/Mozilla.html

This will immediately redirect you to file:///media/sf_websphere_media/media_80/wp_package/Setup/launchpad/en/noBrowser.html - it may not even be apparent that a redirection occurs, which can be frustrating.

What's happening here is that the javascript file "Mozilla.js" (called from "Mozilla.html") is attempting to make a netscape.security.PrivilegeManager.enablePrivilege call, which is no longer supported by Firefox.  This throws a javascript error, which triggers the redirect.

Mozilla.js Line 43: netscape.security.PrivilegeManager.enablePrivilege("UniversalXPConnect");

Support for enablePrivilege has been removed in Firefox (Bug 546848), so it is no longer possible to get special elevated privileges by using this method.

For details about the change to Firefox, the following support note: http://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/944433


To get around this problem, I installed an older version of Firefox (10.2).  Once I did this, everything worked great!  You can find older versions of Firefox here:  https://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/

Happy Portalling!