How does Chromium pick a MIME-type handler?

Question

Chromium doesn't seem to have any obvious MIME-type configuration settings, which strikes me as a little broken. My specific problem is that there are a number of filetypes that Chromium plays in-browser that I'd rather either download or associate with whatever my system-default MIME-type would suggest. Can this be done?

And here are two related (unanswered) questions, asking if there's a way to tell Chromium not to play mpeg video and mp3 files.

Solution

Look at this ArchWiki entry in the section on File associations. To quote from there:

Unlike Firefox, Chromium does not maintain its own database of mimetype-to-application associations. Instead, it relies on Xdg-open to open files and other mime types, for example, magnet links. See Xdg-open for more information.

There are exceptions to this rule though. In the case of mailto URIs chromium calls out to xdg-email which is similar to xdg-open. Other protocol handlers may have equivalent scripts so check /usr/bin/xdg*. ...

Comments

[Ternary]

No - wait - Chromium is still broken for those mimetypes where it has some sort of builtin player (see related. My thought at first was something like "oh hey - xdg-mime query default audio/mpeg gives me totem.desktop and Chromium is somehow deciding that this means it should use its (disabled) Totem plugin to play these in-browser - so I changed to xdg-mime default banshee.desktop audio/mpeg but still get the obnoxious builtin player. Which, in the first place, all I want is to download the file rather than try to open it.

[John P]

Has anyone found a resolution for this? Chromium automatically handles audio/mpeg files with a tiny rectangular player. The position slider is extremely small and the knob is too large; magnifying the page magnifies everything proportionally, so the knob covers just as much as before. I can find plenty of apps that intercept matching content, e.g. "right click -> open in VLC", but no way to actually replace the handler. Is this what you're talking about? It's been five years! (And on that note, the "related" link is dead.)