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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-24T11:07:04+00:00

Using the Eclipse SDK under Linux, there’s an entry in the list of External

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Using the Eclipse SDK under Linux, there’s an entry in the list of “External web browsers” for “Default system web browser”. How is this default determined?

I set up and selected an entry that calls my own version of xdg-open which is just a wrapper to launch Chromium. But, when I launched a project from the GWT plugin, it defaulted back to “Default system web browser”.

I don’t use a major desktop environment (neither GNOME nor KDE), so I’m unsure how any default would be set. But it would be nicer to set this globally and avoid per-application (or per-plugin) configuration in the future.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Ended up source diving. I wrote and stepped into a simple Eclipse Application that only gets the default browser the way Eclipse (the IDE) itself does (in org.eclipse.ui.internal.browser.SystemBrowserInstance):

    Program.findProgram("html")

    Turns out Eclipse identifies my “desktop” as DESKTOP_GIO, because I have the GIO library installed as part of some GNOME dependency. Because it ID’s me as such it calls this libgio function:

    g_app_info_get_default_for_type("text/html", false)

    According to the docs, GIO applications use the X Desktop Group (XDG) “standard” Shared MIME-info Database to find applications that support a given MIME type.

    In my case, I’ve never registered any application as the default handler for text/html, but Eclipse simply chooses the first one returned (which happens to be winebrowser, since it has a wine-extension-html.desktop entry in my ~/.local/share/applications/ directory).

    In the end I used:

    desktop-file-install \
    --rebuild-mime-info-cache \
    --dir ~/.local/share/applications \
    custom-script.desktop

    to add a desktop entry for my custom script, and:

    xdg-mime default custom-script.desktop text/html

    to set it as the default for “html” files.

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