Default browser.

[Nat Friedman <nat novell com>]

Hi guys,

What is the canonical way of discovering and setting the user's default
web browser?

Currently I see that gnome-vfs installs schemas for:

        /desktop/gnome/url-handlers/http/*
        
And the gnome-default-applications-properties capplet dutifully uses
these keys: good so far.  

However, there's also a schema installed by libgnome for:

	/desktop/gnome/applications/browser

Then, looking through applications, I see various other bits of
grossness.  Some applications store this preference themselves, some
look at $BROWSER, etc.

I need to figure this out for dashboard, so I know which bookmark
repository is current.  Dashboard can read Epiphany, Galeon, Mozilla and
FireBird bookmarks, and I need to know which ones to pay attention to. 
So gnome_url_show, while helpful, doesn't solve the problem for me.  I'm
sure there are other examples where applications need to know the user's
preferred browser when you don't actually want to load a page.

So, can someone tell me definitively what to look at, and then we'll
have it permanently archived in the mailing list archive so we can point
people at it forever more?

I hope that will lead to applications actually using whatever setting is
preferred, since right now changing your default browser is a royal
pain.  I believe Microsoft got sued for something similar to this at
some point ;-)

Love,
Nat