Dear Apple, why does Safari control my default browser?

I'm sure I have written about this before, but I can't find it so I am going to rant about it once more. With the recent release of Firefox 2, and the optimized versions, I have been fiddling with my Default Web Browser quite a bit. Apple, in all their glorious wisdom, decided that Safari is the app that controls your default web browser.

Huh?

Most of the time I am not running Safari, and it find it rather silly that I must launch a browser that I don't use to make yet another browser my default. This is clearly something that should be a System Preference, since this is a system wide default (logical, ain't I?). The same goes for using Mail.app to set your default email client.

Come on, Apple, give us a pref pane in System Preferences to set these things globally without launching apps that you think we should be using.