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victorz

Member

From: Sweden

Registered: 2012-03-31

Posts: 6

Chromium can't set itself as default browser

Hi everyone!

I recently did some house keeping on my system and removed a bunch of unneeded gnome packages. I haven't used gnome in a long time and thought, why not. As it turns out, I think I managed to remove some package that Chromium relies on to keep track of whether or not it's the default browser.

Every time I start Chromium now, it tells me it's not the default browser and asks me if I want to set it to be. I click that I want it to be so, and the prompt goes away. I then go to the settings but the button is still available to click to make it default (didn't used to be so; it used to be grayed-out). If I click the button in the settings, nothing happens. It remains clickable/not grayed-out.

Is there some package I need to reinstall, or file to edit, that makes Chromium understand that it should be the default browser? If I can just set this in some user-specific, non-system-wide file, that'd be even better.

Any help is appreciated, thanks!

seth

Member

From: Won't reply 2 private help req

Registered: 2012-09-03

Posts: 78,494

Re: Chromium can't set itself as default browser

removed a bunch of unneeded gnome packages

How? Any "pacman -Rdd" involved?

Wild guess: "pacman -Qi xdg-utils", but better show your "recent" pacman logs.

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victorz

Member

From: Sweden

Registered: 2012-03-31

Posts: 6

Re: Chromium can't set itself as default browser

removed a bunch of unneeded gnome packages

How? Any "pacman -Rdd" involved?

How: No -Rdd's involved, no, but basically a bunch of carefully executed -R and "-R $(pacman -Qtdq)". My -R log is here, with what I think may or may not be relevant packages (some were left in that most assuredly are irrelevant, but yeah): https://pastebin.com/YxnFTmnd.

Some packages are repeated in there because while attempting the house keeping, I had to change some flags or abort the operation to reduce the system impact.

Wild guess: "pacman -Qi xdg-utils", but better show your "recent" pacman logs.

For completeness, I do have that installed:

~ λ pacman -Q xdg-utils
xdg-utils 1.1.1-5

These seem to be the only gnome-related packages that are still installed on my system (not sure how to get all of them if there are more):

~ λ pacman -Qqs gnome
adwaita-icon-theme
gnome-themes-standard
gvfs
gvfs-afc
gvfs-gphoto2
gvfs-mtp
gvfs-nfs
gvfs-smb
libgnome-keyring
libsoup

Thanks for getting back to me!

seth

Member

From: Won't reply 2 private help req

Registered: 2012-09-03

Posts: 78,494

Re: Chromium can't set itself as default browser

dconf?
and gtk2 is a hard dependecy of chromium - i don't see how you would have removed that, but if it too desktop-file-utils with it ...

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How to upload text · How to boot w/o GUI · Disable Windows Fast-Start! · Fix your xinitrc

victorz

Member

From: Sweden

Registered: 2012-03-31

Posts: 6

Re: Chromium can't set itself as default browser

dconf?
and gtk2 is a hard dependecy of chromium - i don't see how you would have removed that, but if it too desktop-file-utils with it ...

No, those were aborted in the log. Sorry, I don't know why it just logs the commands and not what is actually performed... But yeah:

~ λ pacman -Qq dconf gtk2 desktop-file-utils
dconf
gtk2
desktop-file-utils

So dconf doesn't seem to be what's missing, right? I really have no clue of what I removed that is needed by Chromium to store the default browser setting. Thanks for trying to help me!

victorz

Member

From: Sweden

Registered: 2012-03-31

Posts: 6

Re: Chromium can't set itself as default browser

Okay, I got it. My $BROWSER environment variable was set to "chromium" in my .zshenv file, which apparently confuses chromium (even though it's set to itself!?). After starting chromium with an unset BROWSER variable, I do not see the default browser prompt anymore.