Ubuntu – xdg-open only opens a new tab in a new Chromium window despite passing it a URL

chromiumxdg-open

When I am using xdg-open to open a link in Chromium, it just results in a new Chromium window with only the new tab page, with nothing else.

For example, xdg-open 'https://askubuntu.com' will just open a new Chromium window and won't open up AskUbuntu.

It just seems that the URL isn't being passed to Chromium, as invoking Chromium directly does work and opens the desired page: chromium-browser 'https://askubuntu.com' works.

Obviously, Chromium is the default browser.

Where could the problem be, and how can I fix that? It is especially annoying when some programs use xdg-open to open a link and you can't go to the page you want, or even see what was opened.

Best Answer

The issue is indeed that xdg-open does not pass the requested URL to Chromium, so instead of running chromium-browser url-here, it is executing chromium-browser which just opens a new window.

After searching on the Internet, I found out that xdg-open uses some "config" files located in /usr/share/applications.

/usr/share/applications/chromium-browser.desktop seemed to be correct, as it is configured to pass the URL to Chromium correctly:

$ grep Exec /usr/share/applications/chromium-browser.desktop
Exec=chromium-browser %U
...

So what was wrong? It turns out that there's another location which xdg-open uses and that has priority over /usr/share/applications.

$ grep Exec ~/.local/share/applications/chromium-browser.desktop
Exec=/usr/lib/chromium-browser/chromium-browser --use-system-title-bar --ppapi-flash-path=/usr/lib/pepflashplugin-installer/libpepflashplayer.so --ppapi-flash-version=14.0.0.125

I have no idea as to why there's another chromium-browser.desktop, but note that this Exec line does not pass the URL; it is missing the %U. So I simply appended %U to this line. This instantly fixed all issues with xdg-open and Chromium.

Related Solutions

Ubuntu – Can you force open links that create a new tab, in the same tab

You can add a little user script to break target="_blank":

var a = document.getElementsByTagName("a");
for (i=0; i<a.length; i++)
    if (a[i].target == "_blank")
        a[i].target = "_self";

How you get something like that to run is another question.

You need to run Chromium with --enable-user-scripts so you need to alter your launchers (right click the menu, edit menus, etc). The command should be:

chromium-browser %U --enable-user-scripts

Then you need to save the script:

mkdir ~/.config/chromium/Default/User\ Scripts/
gedit ~/.config/chromium/Default/User\ Scripts/target-eater.user.js

Paste in the script, save and edit gedit. Launch chromium with --enable-user-scripts and the script should automatically load and start nuking _blanks

Ubuntu – terminal command to open new chromium tab

Open a New Tab and look at the Developer Tools - Sources tab. URL for New Tab is:

chrome-search://local-ntp/local-ntp.html

This will open a new tab in existing Chromium instance:

chromium chrome-search://local-ntp/local-ntp.html

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Ubuntu – Can you force open links that create a new tab, in the same tab

Ubuntu – terminal command to open new chromium tab

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