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In Ubuntu I used 

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

to set the default internet browser manually.

enter image description here

In Manjaro I get:

sudo: update-alternatives: command not found

I have set Firefox as the default in its settings and want it to stay so.

After installing Chromium, the default browser is now Chromium, although I reconfirmed Firefox as such and in Chromnum settings it says: "Chromium cannot determine or set the default browser".

How to make Firefox default browser?

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6
  • Does manjaro have the x-www-browser symlink? And to what it links? Also, is update-alternatives available in Manjaro?
    – Braiam
    Oct 8, 2015 at 12:21
  • @Braiam - No. And no, not even in AUR.
    – user32012
    Oct 8, 2015 at 15:20
  • If your system doesn't have x-www-browser, what is “changing the linked binary” supposed to mean? Are you trying to change the default browser? That depends on the application that launches it — I don't think Manjaro has a system-wide default (and it's more of a user preference anyway). What application are you interested in?
    – Gilles 'SO- stop being evil'
    Oct 8, 2015 at 22:58
  • @Gilles - that phrasing of the title is due to the edit made by Braiam, while I was just asking out of curiosity thinking that the ubuntu option would be available in Manjaro. If not, that's my answer. (Installing Chromium, it took over as default browser. I think I fixed it simply from the FF GUI.)
    – user32012
    Oct 9, 2015 at 7:09
  • 1
    @cipricus Oh, I see, sorry. Your original title was misleading too. Once again, I don't think Manjaro has a system-wide or per-user default, so you'll get better help if you mention which applications you use that launch a browser.
    – Gilles 'SO- stop being evil'
    Oct 9, 2015 at 9:47

7 Answers 7

Reset to default
27

For users of i3wm, in addition to editing ~/.config/mimeapps.list and ~/.i3/config, you also need to change $BROWSER from ~/.profile, set it to /usr/bin/chromium, to prevent browser sessions emerging from the terminal from opening the wrong browser.

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2
  • 6
    Actually, I find that this is the only solution that solved my problem. This is a separate answer. For applications that open the default browser (such as Jupyter) changing just the key bindings won't work.
    – Ébe Isaac
    May 11, 2018 at 7:01
  • for me removing the palemoon package was also required pacman -R palemoon-bin
    – akiva
    Feb 24, 2019 at 21:42
20 
xdg-settings set default-web-browser chromium.desktop
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5
  • 2
    Where chromium is whatever you'd type at the command prompt to start your preferred browser. Eg, it could be google-chrome-stable.
    – Tom Hale
    May 27, 2017 at 7:16
  • 1
    Works for voidlinux with i3.
    – xoryves
    Jun 7, 2018 at 8:30
  • 4
    Does not work on Manjrao I3: xdg-settings: $BROWSER is set and can't be changed with xdg-settings, but Anas answer worked: unix.stackexchange.com/a/434465/28262
    – Florian Brinker
    Nov 20, 2018 at 15:43
  • 1
    For Google Chrome, I had to use xdg-settings set default-web-browser google-chrome.desktop. xdg-settings set default-web-browser google-chrome-stable gave a xdg-settings: invalid application name error; using the full path for google-chrome-stable gave the same error.
    – apaderno
    Aug 9, 2020 at 7:25
  • @apaderno yours was the ONLY solution that helped me on LUBUNTU 20.04 with Google Chrome. However, I had to do unset BROWSER to remove the` $BROWSER` variable so that the xdg-settings command worked.
    – Volomike
    Jan 1 at 7:56
14

This question is a bit old, but I would like to register my solution. After struggling with xdg-settings, what worked for me was xdg-mime.

So, check your default browser with:

xdg-mime query default x-scheme-handler/https

And change whatever browser you want to use. Make sure you use the .desktop after the browser name.

xdg-mime default google-chrome.desktop x-scheme-handler/https
xdg-mime default google-chrome.desktop x-scheme-handler/http

Then, check again:

xdg-mime query default x-scheme-handler/https
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4
  • 1
    Of course, nothing else worked for me. Do you know in which files this configuration is kept ? For me .config/mimeapps.list contained chrome even before xdg-mime...
    – Andrei Boyanov
    Jul 20, 2020 at 13:18
  • 1
    I think mimeapps.list is the default config file for this. Look for this file in other locations. See examples here
    – Karlo Guidoni
    Jul 21, 2020 at 12:02
  • Confirmed working on latest install of manjaro when opening webpage links directly from terminal and in intellij.
    – li x
    Sep 11, 2020 at 9:04
  • This is the best-working answer. I installed brave after having fiddled with mimeapps.list , where I already had set chromium as my default. Brave took over being the default, despite all the entries in mimeapps.list, but this set it back to chromium
    – unsafe_where_true
    Nov 25, 2020 at 17:41
6

Edit your ~/.config/mimeapps.list and replace references to firefox.desktop with google-chrome.desktop.

If you use google-chrome-stable to launch chrome, use that instead, followed by .desktop.

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5

In case someone else has the same issue…

Edit your config file:

nano ~/.i3/config

and change

bindsym $mod+F2 exec …

to your browser of choice (e.g. bindsym $mod+F2 exec google-chrome-stable) Save and reload your config file (mod+Shift+R)

Should be all set…

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2
  • 3
    This seems overly i3-centric.
    – Arnaud Meuret
    Mar 31, 2018 at 9:22
  • Yes... it was. Now on xfce, which Tom addresses below.
    – chris.r
    Dec 4, 2018 at 2:15
2

I tried most of the answers in here. This is what I ended up doing

sudo pacman -R firefox

Just removed firefox. If I install firefox again with sudo pacman -S firefox it sets as default again so annoying.

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1

If you are using i3 with Palemoon pre-installed and want to replace it with a cooler browser, like brave:

Please edit ~/.config/mimeapps.list and replace references to Moon.desktop with brave.desktop.

To easily replace all the Moon cases to brave in the mimeapps.list file with vim, use :%s/Moon/brave/gc and answer yes to each case.

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