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GNOME 3 was released last month, and reviewers were generally impressed with the features and polish of what is undoubtedly a major departure for the GNOME project.¹

The GNOME Shell Cheat Sheet on the GNOME website is super-helpful, and discovering extensions solved almost every problem I had with the new release, but there were a couple of things I couldn't work out.

Having upgraded from Fedora 14 to 15 (via preupgrade, which worked for me at long last), I was dismayed to find GNOME ignoring my previous preferences on default applications – I use evolution anyway, but I didn't appreciate being pressured to switch browser (from Epiphany to Firefox) when the new one integrates worse with GNOME. It turns out that the relevant settings have moved (as part of the general migration to GSettings, one assumes), and the old GConf-based values are a) ignored and b) not migrated. Joy. The new place to configure such things is the "System Info" capplet, which unfortunately doesn't show up in a Shell search for "default" or "application":

In trying to find a solution (Googling² failed spectacularly), I turned to the built-in help system, but couldn't find anything in the categories listed, and couldn't find the search function, either! Finally, the #fedora IRC channel (thanks, so_solid_moo) answering both to the original question and the apparent absence of "search" – it's right there. Apparently.

Whatever people may (legitimately?) say about problems in that community, it is pretty useful when what you're trying to achieve meshes well with what the channel thinks is a good idea. So thanks, folks.