Re: Default browser.

[Malcolm Tredinnick <malcolm commsecure com au>]

On Sat, 2004-02-07 at 11:36, Nat Friedman wrote:
> Hi guys,

Hey Nat.

> What is the canonical way of discovering and setting the user's default
> web browser?
> 
> Currently I see that gnome-vfs installs schemas for:
> 
>         /desktop/gnome/url-handlers/http/*
>         
> And the gnome-default-applications-properties capplet dutifully uses
> these keys: good so far.  
> 
> However, there's also a schema installed by libgnome for:
> 
> 	/desktop/gnome/applications/browser
> 
> Then, looking through applications, I see various other bits of
> grossness.  Some applications store this preference themselves, some
> look at $BROWSER, etc.
> 
> I need to figure this out for dashboard, so I know which bookmark
> repository is current.  Dashboard can read Epiphany, Galeon, Mozilla and
> FireBird bookmarks, and I need to know which ones to pay attention to. 
> So gnome_url_show, while helpful, doesn't solve the problem for me.  I'm
> sure there are other examples where applications need to know the user's
> preferred browser when you don't actually want to load a page.
> 
> So, can someone tell me definitively what to look at, and then we'll
> have it permanently archived in the mailing list archive so we can point
> people at it forever more?

Ever obliging, I would be happy to tell you definitively. Unfortunately,
people will not follow my definitive decree so that gains nothing. :-(

I think your research has identified the problem: we don't have a widely
accepted, canonical source for this information. It is currently done on
an extremely ad-hoc basis. So we need to have the discussion about what
key we should be pointing things towards for GNOME 2.8.

My preference would be to use the gnome-vfs key, just because it is
lower in the dependency stack and because the control centre already
sets it, so things will behave as the user expects. I am not sure what
the history is for the libgnome key, though. It does strike me that
"browser" and "http handler" are not completely the same thing, but I
think that is splitting hairs a bit too finely for the desktop case.

Malcolm