[FEATURE REQ]fetch history and bookmarks from default browser

[ObaraEmmanuel]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
Currently, it is possible to specify a specific browser or even all browsers but it would be interesting if you can specify that history and/or bookmarks be fetched from the default browser in use. This would most probably provide the most credible and recent history. I understand fetching from all browsers would work too but fetching from the default browser will provide the most recent and credible history all while having to only read from one browser.

Describe the solution you'd like
We could start by allowing default as a value to the -b argument. As for the implementation I am open to ideas.

[Samyak2]

Good idea!
The webbrowser module can help with this (wow python has too many inbuilt modules xD).

import webbrowser
c = webbrowser.get()
print(c.name) # or print(c.basename)

The above code gave firefox which is my default browser. It needs to be tested for other browsers too.

[ObaraEmmanuel]

In windows c is a webbrowser.WindowsDefault object and the name and basename attribute are empty strings 😅!

[Samyak2]

For windows, I found these SOF questions:

Question 1

Question 2

Though I haven't tested these.

[ObaraEmmanuel]

>>> from winreg import HKEY_CURRENT_USER, OpenKey, QueryValueEx
>>> reg_path = r'Software\Microsoft\Windows\Shell\Associations\UrlAssociations\https\UserChoice'
>>> with OpenKey(HKEY_CURRENT_USER, reg_path) as key:
...     print(QueryValueEx(key, 'ProgId'))
...
('ChromeHTML', 1)

The solution in Question 2 sorta works as you can see above. ChromeHTML is a weird name and would need us to preprocess. I was able to map out as many of the browsers on windows as I could:

Browser	Registry value
Chrome	ChromeHTML
Edge	MSEdgeHTM
Firefox	FirefoxURL-308046B0AF4A39CB
Opera	OperaStable
Internet Explorer	IE.HTTPS
Edge (Legacy)	AppX90nv6nhay5n6a98fnetv7tpk64pp35es

As you can see, It's a jungle inside the registry. It is still possible to write a function that parses these names nonetheless.

[Samyak2]

Thank you for mapping out those values.

It indeed looks like a jungle haha, this feature will need quite a bit of manual work and some tricks.

Do you want to take up this issue? xD

[ObaraEmmanuel]

No problem, I will begin researching and working on it. We'll need a lot of collaborative effort to ensure it works on as many platforms as possible though.