[thunderbird] Default browser is no longer read from prefs

[Ben Boeckel]

Kevin Kofler <kevin.kofler at chello.at> wrote:
> Christopher Aillon wrote:
>> Now, we're setting _gsettings_ keys in control center, so those gconf
>> keys aren't getting updated when the user toggles that.  But it doesn't
>> matter.  I pushed an update to the default gconf values to launch
>> gvfs-open as the default browser which will read the values out of
>> gsettings.
> 
> Shouldn't we use xdg-open instead of gvfs-open? xdg-open will do the right 
> thing also under other desktop environments.

Eh. Sort of. The $BROWSER envvar needs to be set for non-KDE, non-GNOME,
non-XFCE, non-LXDE(?) environments. And for me, the browser is a
browser, not a universal launcher for umpteen thousand other
applications.

I'd really like to see some way to associate mimetypes with applications
in a general way. $HOME/.config/xdg/mime/ seems as good of a place to me
for this. Symlinking $XDG_MIME_DIR/$mimetype to an application .desktop
file (verifying that mimetypes match) is also fine by me. xdg-open could
then just to the right thing itself and not shuttle things off to
DE-specific tools or assume that the browser is a swiss army knife.

I'd also like to see "mainstream" browsers (Firefox and Chromium, I'm
looking at you; Konqueror already defers to KDE's database which should
itself defer to what I'd like xdg-open to become) to use this on Linux
and not their own databases. If this has changed since I've last used
these browsers day-to-day, that's great.

--Ben