Default browser setting

Thomas Leonard tal00r at ecs.soton.ac.uk
Thu Jul 24 15:00:15 EEST 2003


On Thu, Jul 24, 2003 at 08:07:25AM -0400, Rodney Dawes wrote:
> On Thu, 2003-07-24 at 05:44, Thomas Leonard wrote:
> > On Wed, Jul 23, 2003 at 04:17:34PM -0500, Shaun McCance wrote:
> > > On Wed, 2003-07-23 at 12:48, David Faure wrote:
> > [...]
> > > > See the "mimetype standard" spec, and the proposed
> > > > "mime-type/application mapping spec, being discussed roughly 2 weeks
> > > > ago". Once those two specs are implemented in most desktops, finding
> > > > what's the "preferred browser" is only a matter of looking up
> > > > the preferred application for text/html.
> > > 
> > > That doesn't seem right.  The "preferred browser" shouldn't be bound to
> > > the mime type.
> > 
> > The correct MIME type would be 'text/x-uri' if you don't know what the
> > resource's type is. ie, you're looking for an application that will handle
> > the URI, rather than the thing it points to.
> 
> Regardless of it's correctness, it is too generalized for the purposes
> of this thread. We shouldn't be opening mailto, ftp, gopher, http,
> archie (does anyone still use that?), and god knows what else, all with
> a single application, based on the simple fact that they are URIs.

That's exactly what we want. A GNOME user would set the handler to be
gnome-uri-handler, and a KDE user to kde-uri-handler. Or, if we ever get a
shared configuration system, both could set it to freedesktop-uri-handler.

In any case, the appropriate action would be looked up from the desktop's
preferences.

(if freedesktop-uri-handler existed, it might make sense for everyone to
call that directly instead of going via the MIME type; however, the MIME
type is still required to handle clicking on *.uri files)


-- 
Thomas Leonard			http://rox.sourceforge.net
tal00r at ecs.soton.ac.uk	tal197 at users.sourceforge.net
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