Comment 5 for bug 925603

OK, so I had a look and here's what I found.

On a default Unity desktop, Checkbox runs this to get the preferred browser :

gconftool --get /desktop/gnome/url-handlers/http/command

On my system, this returns "sensible-browser". This is in /usr/bin. Now, sensible-browser is a shell script which in turn appears to call /usr/bin/gnome-www-browser, which symlinks to /etc/alternatives/gnome-www-browser, which in turn symlinks to /usr/bin/chromium-browser (on a system with chromium installed, of course).

It appears we have two problems here. I never asked Chromium to be the default browser, so it's clobbering /etc/alternatives/gnome-www-browser, which in my opinion it shouldn't do. So maybe this bug should have a Chromium task, if it can be verified that it does this.

Second, and more relevant to checkbox, I think it was using xdg-open but it stopped working at some point. I'll try to research how to get gnome3's browser preferences in a way that works for both Oneiric and Precise.

I'll set to Triaged as we know what we have to do.