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?
Best Answer
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: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 theUser Section
.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