Links in updator going to Internet Explorer

Anyway we can get them to go to another web browser like Firefox or what ever we have set up as our default?

This has been brought up many times. I don't think it's impossible, but it'd have to be rebuilt to do so.

In the meantime, I suggest saving this bookmark:
http://www.cityofheroes.com/updater/live.html

That will allow you open the updater's page on your default browser and visit the links without having to use IE.

The topic has been broached before about changing the loader system before to use a Webkit / KHTML or Gecko backend instead of relying on the IE engine to drive webpage generation.

Case in point is Steam which recently left it's dependency on Internet Explorer and developed an entire user-interface using Webkit / KHTML. One of the (many) reasons Valvesoftware moved to Webkit / KHTML is that the new rendering system was platform independent, and a continued reliance on I.E. as a backend would make the *Nix (OSX and Linux) Native clients harder to work with. Not impossible, but more code would have to be created to handle each system's native browsing back-end rather than implementing an existing cross-platform browser engine into the client's code.

One of the advantages to dropping the I.E. backend is the ability to expose to the end user to options to specify which external browsing program should be called for different tasks, such as opening up webpages.

It has been commented that leaving the I.E. backend would require development resources that were not currently available, and the possibility of a loader re-code is expected to be broached after Going Rogue ships.