Firefox not remembering it's the deault browser

[Fernando]

Hi.
After upgrading to 22.04, the new Firefox doesn't remember it's the default browser and keeps asking to be made so every single time it starts, although I agreed the first time. I checked in the system settings and there too it's the default browser.
Not a huge problem but an annoying one.
Any ideas?
Thanks in advance!

[rab0171610]

Just answer no and it will go away.

[Fernando]

No it won't. Either way, Firefox keeps asking. That said, I do want it to be my default browser.
May it have something to do with the Firefox snap Plasma integration not being totally polished, for what I'm reading around?

[rab0171610]

It did in my case but I am not using the snap version. And it didn't change the fact that it is still the default browser.

[Fernando]

Yep, I'm inclined to think the snap version is to blame here. I might wait for a while and see if an update fixes the problem.
Thanks!

[rab0171610]

You could always consider installing firefox from Mozilla directly. It will update itself in the app when you go to help>about firefox.
Install Firefox from Mozilla builds (For advanced users)

• Before you install Firefox, make sure that your computer has the required libraries installed. Missing libraries will cause Firefox to be inoperable.
• To install Firefox with this method, you must be able to login as root or execute sudo commands.
• This installation will have priority over the Firefox version installed through your package manager. To run the version installed with your package manager, you will need to execute the binary from a terminal. To do so in most distributions, open a terminal and type: /usr/bin/firefox.

1. Go to the Firefox download page and click on the Download Now button.

2. Open a terminal and go to the folder where your download has been saved. For example:

cd ~/Downloads

3. Extract the contents of the downloaded file by typing:

tar xjf firefox-*.tar.bz2

4. Move the uncompressed Firefox folder to /opt:

mv firefox /opt

5. Create a symlink to the Firefox executable:

ln -s /opt/firefox/firefox /usr/local/bin/firefox

6. Download a copy of the desktop file:

wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/mo...irefox.desktop -P /usr/local/share/applications

Alternatively, if wget is not installed on your computer, go to the URL mentioned above, right-click on the page to open the contextual menu and select Save Page As. After you downloaded the file, move it to /usr/local/share/applications.

To verify that the installation was successful, you can open the Troubleshooting Information page. In the Application Basics section, the value of Application Binary should be /opt/firefox/firefox-bin.


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[jlittle]

This is a resurfacing of an old problem. I was a little active on bugzilla about it, and many users complained for years. Eventually I just learned how to shut firefox up about it. There's an about:config workaround one can set; it'll be somewhere in the forums.

[rab0171610]

about:config
browser.shell.checkDefaultBrowser
set to false

[Orflovir]

I have this same (or a similar) issue and believe it's a little more serious than some of you make it out to be.

The problem is not just Firefox nagging about it, it's easy enough to make it stop asking (either in Firefox settings, or through about:config as rab0171610 suggested), but the problem is that the default browser setting stopped working properly altogether. Whenever any other application tries to open a browser window, it does not open Firefox, even though I have set Firefox as my default browser in System Settings->Applications->Default Applications. Instead it tries to open something called WSLView, fails and then no browser window opens at all.

Before upgrading to 22.04, this worked perfectly fine. When I noticed I could no longer open browser windows from within other applications, I looked at the setting in System Settings. WSLView (whatever that may be) was set as the default browser. Changing it (back) to Firefox doesn't seem to do anything, any attempt to open a browser window from any other application is still unsuccesful.

I'm not sure if it's a bug in Firefox or in (K)ubuntu, but it's pretty annoying when using programs whose built-in help files rely on opening a browser window.

[arsivci]

WSLview is for windows, WSL stands for Windows Subsystem for Linux.

[Orflovir]

WSLview is for windows, WSL stands for Windows Subsystem for Linux.

In that case, I have no idea why it's appearing on my Kubuntu system. I don't have any Windows installation anywhere near it. ;-)

[rab0171610]

I am not at my machine right now, but this also happened to me, but with gwenview for some reason instead of dolphin as default file browser. I seem to remember that both were listed in the options for default file browser in system settings, but I was able to delete gwenview from the list of options. That fixed my problem. I seem to recall it was listed as secondary or backup or something similar. I was able to remove it as an option somehow leaving only dolphin as a singular option in the list. I think i either had to reboot or logout for change to take effect, but away from desktop now. Sorry if this is not helpful.

[Snowhog]

See: http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/...wslview.1.html

[Orflovir]

See: http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/...wslview.1.html

Thank you. Any suggestion on how to stop it from appearing? I don't have any Windows installation running, so it naturally doesn't do anything useful for me.

[rab0171610]

You could try uninstalling it, but maybe it is a dependency. Or you could temporarily mv the binary adding .bak to the end of filename to see what happens if app is not found.