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1passenger
Asked: 2011-05-01 12:13:47 +0800 CST

Can't set Chromium as default browser

  • 772

I open Chromium and the browser ask me if I want to set it as my default browser. I click on "set as default" and close the browser.

But when I open Chromium again I get the same question. Ubuntu 11.04 seems not to set Chromium correctly as my default browser.

How to fix that?

11.04

4 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    Try changing your your preferred browser.

    17.10+

    Settings > Details > Default Applications

    screenshot

    On older versions

    1. Open Preferred Applications from Preferences > Preferred Appplications.

      enter image description here

    2. Change the default Web Browser to your liking.

      enter image description here

    • 11

  2. To change the browser globally, run the next command in a terminal:

    sudo update-alternatives --config x-www-browser

    Enter the number of chromium-browser and press Enter to confirm it.

    • 8

  3. Start google-chrome from a terminal in the foreground (leave off the &):

    me:/home/me> google-chrome

    Click on the prompt to make chrome the default browser.... notice that it is getting a permissions problem on .local/share/applications/mimeapps.list. The applications directory is owned by root and chrome was running as me. In order to fix the problem, I used:

    chown -R me.me .local

    Then I restarted google-chrome. It created the following entries in

    cat .local/share/applications/mimeapps.list

    [Default Applications]
text/html=google-chrome.desktop
text/xml=google-chrome.desktop
x-scheme-handler/http=google-chrome.desktop
x-scheme-handler/https=google-chrome.desktop
x-scheme-handler/about=google-chrome.desktop
x-scheme-handler/unknown=google-chrome.desktop

    I suppose you could just create those entries in the file if there is a security problem with changing the owner of the .local directory.

    • 1

  4. For me updating the alternatives in Ubuntu 19.10 did not work, it appears it depends on the fact URLs are opened by xdg-open, and I found that this made it work:

    xdg-settings set default-web-browser chromium-browser.desktop
    • 0