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How to detect default browser from a script?

marcin

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Location: Ottawa, ON, Canada

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Monday, November 13th 2006, 10:35pm

How to detect default browser from a script?

Hi, everyone

In my research I found a way to determine a default browser from a script in gnome, but am having much harder time in kde. Someone mentioned DCOP as a way to get that information, but there was not enough details to make it work. Does anyone here have more insight into that problem? I would really appreciate a pointer or two. Thanks.

Marcin

Kasyx

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Monday, November 13th 2006, 10:59pm

What do you mean default browser? I select the browser I want to use in KDE in the Control Panel, under KDE Components - Component Chooser - Web Browser. I think that is only followed by applications built around the KDE framework though - others (like gaim) have that option built in.

marcin

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Monday, November 13th 2006, 11:56pm

What I'm trying to do is to detect from a script a default browser on a particular machine under kde. Different default browser may be selected by a user: firefox, konqueror, mozilla, epiphany, etc. I have to open an HTTP connection to a specific web site and it would be polite to use the browser which was selected by that user. So, to be specific, I'm looking for a file which contains that default browser name, or for an output of a command, which will give me that name. For example, in gnome I can use the following:

# gconftool-2 --get /desktop/gnome/url-handlers/http/command

and it produces the following output:

firefox %s

FnordPerfect

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Saturday, November 25th 2006, 9:46pm

I don't think there is a way to use DCOP to find out KDE's default browser.
DCOP is for Inter-process communication, so I guess sycoca (KDE's system configuration cache) might be worth looking into.
However, a workaround might be to simply grep it from the configuration file itself.
It's set in BrowserApplication=... , in the file $HOME/.kde/share/config/kdeglobals

Sadly there is no consistent, cross-distribution desktop-environment-independent way to find out the default browser.
Debian, and probably other Debian-based distros, provide the script 'sensible-browser'. Also, many programs used to evaluate the $BROWSER shell variable.

hope that helps

cheers
fabian

marcin

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Monday, November 27th 2006, 7:22pm

Hi, fabian

Thanks for your reply. I checked SuSE 9.0, 9.3 and 10.1 and none of them had the $BROWSER variable set or had BrowserApplication set in $HOME/.kde/share/config/kdeglobals. I checked both root and user accounts... The search continues.

Regards

Marcin

This post has been edited 1 times, last edit by "marcin" (Nov 27th 2006, 7:23pm)