I'm surprised that you got Firefox to direct you to a web-based account when you clicked on an email link. The whole point of such links is that they launch your default email client (such as Outlook, Outlook Express, Windows Live Mail or Thunderbird) with the address already filled in, rather than go to a web page (which is what you seem to want to do). That applies across ALL web browsers.
I can only assume that you must have had an extension installed with Firefox, which changed the normal way that it responded to you clicking on an email link. Here's something similar for Chrome:
http://howto.cnet.com...ail-client-in-chrome/
Chris