Properly Setting A Default Web Browser

I'm growing increasingly impressed with Xubuntu but setting the default web browser is a nightmare. In theory, you simply choose your preferred web browser in the settings and it should be enough. Some applications just ignore this and open in whatever was set before them by the distro makers. There is a reason, and a solution.

Instead of set commands being hardwired, these are variables triggering other commands. The "web browser" link on the XFCE menu isn't hardwired to Firefox, it looks for the variable, if that variable is set to Firefox, it opens Firefox. The key is how to change this.

An app call galternatives in the repositories is what you need. It's a GUI app appearing on the Administration menu as Alternatives Configurator. This requires root privileges to run, so you will be asked for your password. It has a lot of defaults you can alter, you're looking for two specifically:

• gnome-www-browser
• x-www-browser

Some applications use one variable, some use the other. This is why some applications ignore the defaults, and why you need to set both. So switch both of these to your browser of choice. As a final touch I had to go back into the XFCE settings to ensure Chromium was set as the preferred browser after that, then tell Chromium when it opened to set itself as default. With that, no matter what application you click a link to "open in web browser" it should always open in your browser of choice. It shouldn't be needed to do this type of repeated enforcement just to set a consistent default web browser that's respected, but it does work. Here's hoping this is fixed in future editions so you don't have to jump through all these hoops.