Comment 15 for bug 513133

@Michael Terry: what patch did you throw over the wall to xdg-utils? URL?

Xdg-open calls gnome-open and kfmclient to open urls. Gnome-open and kfmclient checks certain GNOME / KDE settings to figure out how to handle urls. Xdg-settings works by checking those same settings.

Please remember the xdg/portland project is about having a standard way of opening files, url, emails, etc on all Linux desktop environments in all Linux distros. AFAIK, x-www-browser is a Debianism that doesn't exist in rpm-land.

Additionally, unlike your per-user GNOME/KDE settings, x-www-browser is a system setting that requires root to change. It seems wrong for Chromium / xdg-settings to change x-www-browser when one user on the system decides to set it as their default browser. What happens to x-www-browser when Alice and Bob have different browser preferences?

As far as Chromium developers are concerned, we want to support the majority of its users, but at the same time not be burdened with having to deal with each individual desktop environment / distro since the Linux desktop landscape is so diverse. Thus we use xdg-utils wherever we can. So sort out how xdg-utils should interact with x-www-browser and go from there.