Eclipse default system web browser

Question

Using the Eclipse SDK under Linux, there's an entry in the list of "External web browsers" for "Default system web browser". How is this default determined?

I set up and selected an entry that calls my own version of xdg-open which is just a wrapper to launch Chromium. But, when I launched a project from the GWT plugin, it defaulted back to "Default system web browser".

I don't use a major desktop environment (neither GNOME nor KDE), so I'm unsure how any default would be set. But it would be nicer to set this globally and avoid per-application (or per-plugin) configuration in the future.

Answer 1

Ended up source diving. I wrote and stepped into a simple Eclipse Application that only gets the default browser the way Eclipse (the IDE) itself does ( in org.eclipse.ui.internal.browser.SystemBrowserInstance ):

Program.findProgram("html")

Turns out Eclipse identifies my "desktop" as DESKTOP_GIO , because I have the GIO library installed as part of some GNOME dependency. Because it ID's me as such it calls this libgio function:

g_app_info_get_default_for_type("text/html", false)

According to the docs , GIO applications use the X Desktop Group (XDG) "standard" Shared MIME-info Database to find applications that support a given MIME type.

In my case, I've never registered any application as the default handler for text/html, but Eclipse simply chooses the first one returned (which happens to be winebrowser , since it has a wine-extension-html.desktop entry in my ~/.local/share/applications/ directory).

In the end I used:

desktop-file-install \
    --rebuild-mime-info-cache \
    --dir ~/.local/share/applications \
    custom-script.desktop

to add a desktop entry for my custom script, and:

xdg-mime default custom-script.desktop text/html

to set it as the default for "html" files.

Answer 2

If you're on a system that has the update-alternatives command, try to see what update-alternatives --display x-www-browser gives you - it defines what the default web browser is. use update-alternatives --config x-www-browser to set it to a specific program.

Answer 3

This is an old question, but I thought I would add what worked for me. I am running Gnome Classic on Debian Wheezy and installed Chromium.

I tried the update-alternatives approach to change the system-wide defaults from Iceweasel to Chromium:

update-alternatives --config x-www-browser
update-alternatives --config gnome-www-browser

but Eclipse was still picking up Iceweasel. I then edited /etc/gnome/defaults.list to replace each instance of 'iceweasel.desktop' to 'chromium.desktop'.

I logged out and back in again, to be sure I get the new defaults, and this time Eclipse used the system browser, Chromium.