Wrong web browser opened when clicking links

[NobodysNightmare]

Preflight Checklist

• I have read the Contributing Guidelines for this project.
• I agree to follow the Code of Conduct that this project adheres to.
• I have searched the issue tracker for a bug report that matches the one I want to file, without success.

Electron Version

33.3.0

What operating system(s) are you using?

Ubuntu

Operating System Version

24.04

What arch are you using?

x64

Last Known Working Electron version

No response

Expected Behavior

Links open in the configured default browser

Actual Behavior

Links open in Chrome/Chromium instead, regardless of the configured default browser

Testcase Gist URL

https://gist.github.com/Viicos/d77af018be1b7b27294a74c378731992

Additional Information

This is a re-open of #42611 (by @bittylicious) after @Viicos was so kind to add a repro gist (adding a gist was an absolute requirement by the Electron team on the original issue).

The original issue already well pointed out that this issue seems to be new with Ubuntu 24 and wasn't present on 22.

Workarounds presented in in the original issue:

• Uninstalling all chrome/chromium (then e.g. a firefox will be correctly opened)
• Adding the following to ~/.local/share/applications/mimeapps.list

[Default Applications]
x-scheme-handler/http=firefox_firefox.desktop
x-scheme-handler/https=firefox_firefox.desktop

There are some additional details available in the original issue.

[mlaurencin]

As I mentioned in the closed issue, the provided gist produced the expected behavior on Windows, so this is most likely a Linux only issue.

[t3chguy]

@mlaurencin that's how it was triaged from the get-go, what made an inability to repro in Windows appropriate to close the issue?

[Viicos]

what made an inability to repro in Windows appropriate to close the issue?

This wasn't the reason the original issue was closed, but rather because it was missing a simple reproducible example (as mentioned here).

[bittylicious]

Thank you for doing this @NobodysNightmare @Viicos .

This is just a grumbling response as it would have affected everybody who uses Firefox as their default browser, on the latest stable Ubuntu, yet the original issue was closed even though it is easy to reproduce. This must affect thousands of people and likely lose Firefox a lot of "default browser" settings, which sucks when Chrome has such market share.