Comment 4 for bug 406352

But we're not opening an HTML file, we're opening a web site, and so the
code in GNOME doesn't hit the mimeinfo.cache or desktop files to start
the browser. Instead, it reads the "Preferred Applications" gconf keys,
unless the preferred applications keys are disabled, in which case it
falls back to the MIME handler for whatever content type is returned by
an HTTP HEAD request (which may often also be incorrect).

It seems to me this specific bug is an example of the case where an
alternate browser has been installed, and is used by the user, but the
Preferred Applications settings have not been updated to point at
instead.

On Fri, 2009-07-31 at 00:16 +0000, Paul Sladen wrote:
> Trying to track down what's happening here with 'strace xdg-open
> foo.html':
>
> /usr/share/applications/mimeinfo.cache
>
> contains:
>
> text/html=epiphany.desktop;firefox.desktop;
>
> which results in a read of:
>
> /usr/share/applications/firefox.desktop
>
> which lists:
>
> Exec=firefox %u
>
> which causes:
>
> execve("/usr/bin/firefox", ["firefox", "foo.html"], ...)
>
> Now which of those are different/incorrectly set on a manually performed
> firefox-3.5 install?
>