How to launch default web browser from the terminal?

I was wondering what's the terminal command to open the default web browser.

0

7 Answers

sensible-browser is the command you're looking for.

Or:

xdg-open <URL>.

6

Searching on Google I found the answer.

xdg-open opens a file or URL in the user's preferred application. If a URL is provided the URL will be opened in the user's preferred web browser. If a file is provided the file will be opened in the preferred application for files of that type. xdg-open supports file, ftp, http and https URLs.

xdg-open is part of xdg-utils package and it's already installed on Ubuntu 10.10.

7

You can also use:

x-www-browser 

And it will open the URL in the default browser.

2

Just that you may find it useful. A fallback approach, and one liner.

URL=""; xdg-open $URL || sensible-browser $URL || x-www-browser $URL || gnome-open $URL

Good reading for the no familiar with the logical operators .

; => run in all cases,

|| => run if the precedent command failed (or)

&& => run only if the precedent command succeed

and

var=someval -> set a variable

$var -> invoke the variable

3

With default Ubuntu setup only gnome-open command comes to mind.

gnome-open 

6

I played around this a little. There is a problem with gnome-open — it won't invoke the default web browser unless you specify a url. That's a problem if you want to set up an icon or a shortcut that will always launch the browser that is set as default. Other times you might need to set it as a parameter for some programs that require a link to a web browser and don't work well with gnome-open (e.g.: acroread). You might solve this by using either x-www-browser or gnome-www-browser system links that you can set up through update-alternatives, but those are system wide settings, not user specific (and they are not synchronized with the values set through gnome-default-applications-properties. All this can be solved by opening the sensible-browserexecutable (which is actually a script):

sudo gedit $(which sensible-browser)

and adding this at the beginning:

#!/bin/bash
BROWSER=$(gconftool -g /desktop/gnome/url-handlers/http/command)
export BROWSER="${BROWSER//"\"%s\""/}"

That will make sensible-browser always launch the user-specified default web browser. (I found out that gnome-default-applications-properties changes some gconf keys according to the browser that is currently set. The default browser value can be obtained from any of these keys so I went for /desktop/gnome/url-handlers/http/command and used it to fill the $BROWSER variable (the value is stripped of the "%s" part). )

2

On Raspberry Pi Ubuntu I did this to start a webpage, fullscreen (in Kiosk mode) on startup:

# put in ~/.bash_profile
DISPLAY=:0 chromium-browser --app= —kiosk &

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