Can't set Chromium as default browser

Question

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?

Solution 1

Try changing your your preferred browser.

17.10+

Settings > Details > Default Applications

On older versions

1. Open Preferred Applications from Preferences > Preferred Appplications.

   

2. Change the default Web Browser to your liking.

   

Solution 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.

Solution 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.

Comments

[Code.Decode]

It's definitely worth trying to set it through Preferred Applications. There was (and possibly still is) a strange bug if you didn't set it this way.

[1passenger]

That's not working...

[Seamus]

update-alternatives should work (note the extra s)

[1passenger]

That's it! After changing the settings in Preferred Applications and setting Chromium as default browser again everything is working fine. Maybe a problem with a restore of an Ubuntu 10.10 backup.

[Lekensteyn]

@1passenger: the s after update-alternative slipped out. Try the new command.

[1passenger]

I had to wait a minute ;-) Now it's accepted. Thanx. :-)

[1passenger]

Sorry, mistake in writing. I meant update-alternatives and not update-alternative.

[keiki]

Somehow I had two /usr/bin/chromium-browser in the list. One in auto and one in manual mode, but the manual one was selected. After I changed to the auto one it works.