How to set downloaded Firefox to default web browser in Debian?

Question

How do I set a manually downloaded Firefox as my default web browser so that clicking a link in another application will open the link in this Firefox?

I tried these commands, but they didn't seem to work:

update-alternatives --install /usr/bin/x-www-browser x-www-browser /home/user/firefox/firefox 100
update-alternatives --set x-www-browser /home/user/firefox/firefox

What do I have to do?

Solution 1

update-alternatives changes the application to use to open a web browser, not the application to use to open a web page. The two are not directly related: “I want to browse the web” is different from “I want to browse this web page”, and there are different kinds of content that happen to all open in a web browser.

What you need to change is which application is associated with the MIME type text/html, and perhaps others. These are configured through the /etc/mailcap file.

On Debian, /etc/mailcap is automatically generated from the applications you have installed. When multiple applications can open the same type, there is a priority system (similar, but distinct, from the priority system for alternatives). You can override these priorities by adding entries to /etc/mailcap.order. For example, the following line will cause Firefox to be used in preference of any other application for all the types it supports:

firefox:*/*

After you've changed /etc/mailcap.order, run /usr/sbin/update-mime as root to update /etc/mailcap.

If you want to use a program that doesn't come from a Debian package, edit it directly into /etc/mailcap, in the User Section.

# ----- User Section Begins ----- #
text/html; /home/user/firefox/firefox '%s'; description=HTML Text; test=test -n "$DISPLAY";  nametemplate=%s.html
# -----  User Section Ends  ----- #

If you want to set preferences for your own account, define them in ~/.mailcap: the entries in that file override the ones in /etc/mailcap. You have to put full mailcap lines there, such as

text/html; /home/user/firefox/firefox '%s'; description=HTML Text; test=test -n "$DISPLAY";  nametemplate=%s.html

Solution 2

Run both of the commands as root (you should have received a "Permission denied" error when trying to do this without root privileges). Now if you run (or another application runs) x-www-browser, /home/user/firefox/firefox should be the one that gets used.

You can also use the convenient interactive mode update-alternatives --config <name> to set default applications instead of using --set.

Comments

[Admin]

- If typing $ x-www-browser in the terminal opens the correct browser but: - $ xdg-open https://www.example.com opens the wrong browser application, - editing ~/.config/mimeapps.list as suggested by @Chalist and then restarting should do the trick.

[Chalist]

i do this with root access but don't work

[Anju Fabulina]

@chalist: Do you receive an error message? What is the output of update-alternatives --display x-www-browser?

[Chalist]

x-www-browser - manual mode link currently points to /home/user/firefox/firefox /home/user/firefox/firefox - priority 100 /usr/bin/chromium - priority 40 Current 'best' version is '/home/user/firefox/firefox'.

[Anju Fabulina]

How do you see that it's not working? Which browser gets chosen when you start x-www-browser yourself?

[Chalist]

when i click a link in application look like choqok i will open in firefox(extracted in home)

[Chalist]

i do this but again don't work. for example in x-chat when i click on link nothing happen.