With the release of Steam Community and other new Steam features, you probably want steam:// URLs to work in Firefox. Luckily for you, it's REALLY simple (and maybe the Codeweavers folks can put this into 6.2.1 or something...? :) ). Anyway, here's what you have to do:

1. Create a folder in your home folder called .scripts (or whatever you want). On the CLI, this can be done by typing mkdir ~/.scripts.
2. Open your favorite text editor and make a file in that folder (which is now hidden) called steam-launch.sh.
3. Copy and paste the following script:

!/bin/bash

/opt/cxoffice/bin/wine --bottle win2000 "/home/$USER/.cxoffice/win2000/drive_c/Program Files/Steam/Steam.exe" $@

If your CrossOver isn't installed in /opt/cxoffice like mine is, change the path to the right place.  
4. Make the script executable. **chmod +x ~/.scripts/steam-launch.sh** will work on the CLI, otherwise your GUI will have some option.  
5. Open Firefox and go to about:config.  
6. Right click and pick New > String  
7. Type in **network.protocol-handler.app.steam** for the name and **/home/*your_username_here*/.scripts/steam-launch.sh** for the value.  
8. Right click and pick New > Boolean  
9. Type in **network.protocol-handler.external.steam** for the name and **true** for the value.  
10. Restart Firefox.  
11. [This should open up your Games](steam://open/games/)

Is this what needs to be done to have urls function IN steam. When I view the admin page of a group I manage I can select make announcement but it will not let me type, I can not boot or promote members. The web functions IN steam are not functioning. Is this the solution?

If so I have some questions, Mac is new to me as of two days ago, so I am a newbie.

The home folder, is that has the little house icon with my name under it?
Where do I type the make directory command? I am guessing the equivalent of "run" command for windows... I just do not know where it is.
What is the text editor for mac... where is it?

I have firefox open and I see nothing regarding about:config or anything at all that has config?

2 day old mac user.

Hi Blashy,

Keith's suggestion is not in reference to making URLs function in Steam. We have implemented a replacement for Microsoft's HTML engine (basically Internet Explorer) built from Gecko (the HTML engine inside Firefox). As you might imagine, the two are not exactly clean fits for one another. What you are seeing in Steam is one of the rough edges that still need to be worked out. Please file a support ticket and we'll put you in touch with our developer who is in charge of the HTML engine.

The rest of Keith's post is a little Unix-y. Now Mac OS X is a type of Unix, and what he suggests can be made to work, although a number of things will be more complicated because of differences in how CrossOver operates on the Mac. Let me know if you want me to get into the technical weeds.

Yes, the little house icon is your home in the Finder.

When Keith referred to "CLI", that means "command line interface". To issue commands at the command line on the Mac, you launch the Terminal application, which you can find in /Applications/Utilities. At the Unix command line, the tilde ('~') is an abbreviation for your home directory.

The usual GUI text editor on the Mac is TextEdit, which is in /Applications. At the command-line, you can use a text-based (non-graphical) editor like "pico" or "vi", but those get kind of complicated. The downside to TextEdit is that it supports rich text (e.g. bold, italic, various fonts, etc.) which is not compatible with command-line stuff, like script files. If you're editing a plain text file, always make sure to switch TextEdit into plain text mode. If you're at the command line and want to open a text file in TextEdit, you can type "open -e <filename>".

When Keith referred to about:config in Firefox, that's a special URL that you type into the location field to access a bunch of hidden Firefox preferences.

Welcome to the Mac. 😊

hey Ken Thomases,

I am using Mac OS X with CrossOver Games (7.0.0).
The Howto is not working for me either!

Firefox gives me an error telling me:
protocol steam unknown or no program linked (translated from german)

Hi,

I'm using CrosOver Mac and Leopard.
I've just bought Quake 3 Pack from Steam using a PayPal: Steam navigated me to the Safari PayPal, where I choosd my credit card, etc and made a purchase. Then Safari tried to call "steam://paypal/return", but had no success...
I was frustrated: downloaded FireFox, made all possible and impossible like people suggested for Linux - nothing...
Then I did a very small thing: called from CrossOver - Run Command from the menu ""<path to the Steam.exe>" "steam://paypal/return"" and everything worked great ;)
Hope, this helps

Alex

Hi.
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=433548 is showing KDE/Gnome/Firefox ways to enable the steam protocol. Notice how he has put the script in his path (/usr/bin/steam) and only calls "steam" in firefox - I don't know if /home/$USER exists in Mac.
I personally (linux) used the method described above (same as described in the ubuntu-forum), but modified the script for Version 7.0.0 - notice "cxgames" instead of "cxoffice".

#!/bin/bash

/opt/cxgames/bin/wine --bottle win2000 "$HOME/.cxgames/win2000/drive_c/Program Files/Steam/Steam.exe" $@ 

Nils

_LucID wrote:

Then I did a very small thing: called from CrossOver - Run Command
from the menu ""<path to the Steam.exe>" "steam://paypal/return""
and everything worked great ;)
Hope, this helps

Yes, it did.
The mentioned method with Firefox did not with Mac

I cannot make purchases with steam on my mac-(
Is it really hard to implement patch to support my trick, mentioned above?

There are a couple of approaches to take:

1) Install the Windows version of Firefox in the bottle with Steam. Then, use that to browse http://store.steampowered.com/ and make your purchase. Since it's in the bottle with Steam, it will be able to send steam://... URLs to Steam.

2) If you have the necessary steam://... URL, you can open it using the Run Command dialog. You don't even need to specify the path to Steam.exe. You can just use the command "start <url>". It's tedious, but you can obtain the URL by looking at the source of Got Steam? page in a Mac-native browser.

In the meantime, I am looking into the possibility of having CrossOver handle steam://... URLs and passing them from your Mac-native browser to Steam automatically. Ultimately, of course, we'd like the CrossOver HTML Engine to handle the JavaScript elements of the Steam Store within the Steam GUI -- in other words, without the need for an external browser.