Setting the default browser when update-alternatives fails (Shallow Thoughts)

Setting the default browser when update-alternatives fails

I ran ubuntu-bug to report a bug. After collecting some dependency info, the program asked me if I wanted to load the bug report page in a browser. Of course I did -- but it launched chromium, where I don't have any of my launchpad info loaded, rather than firefox.

So how do you change the default browser in Ubuntu? The program that controls that, and lots of similar defaults, is update-alternatives.

update-alternatives with no arguments gives a long usage statement that isn't too clear. You need to know the various category names ("groups") before you can do much. Here's how to get a list of all the groups:

update-alternatives --get-selections

But that's still a long list. To find the entries that might be pointing to chrome or chromium, I narrowed it down:

update-alternatives --get-selections | grep chrom

That narrowed it down: x-www-browser and gnome-www-browser both pointed to chromium. So let's try to change that to firefox:

$ update-alternatives --set gnome-www-browser /usr/local/firefox11/firefox
update-alternatives: error: alternative /usr/local/firefox11/firefox for gnome-www-browser not registered, not setting.

Whoops! The problem here is that I'm running a firefox installed from Mozilla.org, not the one that comes with Ubuntu. What if I want to make that my default browser? What does it mean for an application to be "registered"?

Well, no one seems to have documented that. I found it discussed briefly here: What is Ubuntu's Definition of a “Registered Application”?, but the only solutions seemed to involve hand-editing desktop files to add icons, and there's no easy way to figure out how much of the desktop file it needs. That sounded way too complicated.

Thanks to Lyz and Maco for the real answer: skip update-alternatives entirely, and change the symbolic links in /etc/alternatives by hand.

$ sudo rm /etc/alternatives/gnome-www-browser
$ sudo ln -s /usr/local/firefox11/firefox /etc/alternatives/gnome-www-browser
$ sudo rm /etc/alternatives/x-www-browser
$ sudo ln -s /usr/local/firefox11/firefox /etc/alternatives/x-www-browser 

That was much simpler, and worked fine: now applications that need to call up a browser will use firefox instead of chromium.