How can I set a manually installed browser as the default on Debian-based distributions like Ubuntu and Mint?

Feb 5, 2019

Original Post

Hi

I am trying to set my Firefox developer as default in GNU/Linux, But I am stuck. Firefox Dev didn’t shows up in sudo update-alternatives --config x-www-browser. In some app I have set them manually, but it’s painful to set to every app, since they read the default value in my system. I don’t use desktop environment so .desktop didn’t work for me.

Anyone successfully add firefox Dev as default using sudo update-alternatives --config x-www-browser ?

Thanks.

My Comments

This may be helpful for you: https://askubuntu.com/a/965417

Mirrored below:

I have qutebrowser installed to ~/.local/bin which is on my $PATH. I had put the full path to the executable, meaning I had to run

sudo update-alternatives --install /usr/bin/x-www-browser x-www-browser $HOME/.local/bin/qutebrowser 200

instead of using qutebrowser only as second-to-last argument (because update-alternatives complained about the path not being absolute) then

update-alternatives --config x-www-browser

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