Comment 10 for bug 513133

For the patch itself, please make the change to xdg-settings.in as well.

The problem reported to Ubuntu mostly comes from the Chromium PPA being packaged funny:

1. As you mentioned, the package has /usr/lib/chromium-browser/chromium-browser and /usr/lib/chromium-browser, so there's confusion when the latter messes with PATH. Google Chrome doesn't have this problem, it's binary and wrapper scripts are /opt/google/chrome/chrome and /opt/google/chrome/google-chrome, respectively.

2. The chromium package's xml file in
/usr/share/gnome-control-center/default-apps uses the basename, but it uses xdg-settings, which sets the full path. This mismatch confuses Gnome's Preferred Applications. Google Chrome works fine with Preferred Applications because it use the full path in the xml file.

If the Chromium PPA fixed those two issues, then there shouldn't be a problem with using the full path with Gnome. As far as I can tell, Gnome doesn't have a technical limitation that says basename only. It's only done by convention.

The reason we used the full path is so Chromium developers can run a self built copy of Chromium, set that as the default browser, and have the desktop environment know to use it as the default browser rather than the installed package. While this isn't a common use case for most users, it's very helpful for developers.