Browsers and Profiles

Browsers and profiles

What LinkUnbound detects

On start, LinkUnbound asks the system which browsers are installed: the registry on Windows, Launch Services on a Mac. Any browser the system knows about shows up, with its icon. Nothing has to be configured.

For Chromium-based browsers (Chrome, Edge, Brave, Vivaldi, Opera, Arc, Chromium and others) it also reads their profiles, by the names you gave them, and each profile becomes its own row in the picker. Every channel reads its own profiles, so Chrome Beta doesn't offer Chrome's.

Firefox and its relatives appear as a single row that opens in the profile Firefox chooses. If you want one row per Firefox profile, add a custom browser (below) with -P "Profile name" as its argument.

Private windows

LinkUnbound knows the private-window switch each family expects:

Family	Switch
Microsoft Edge	-inprivate
Firefox, LibreWolf, Waterfox, Zen	-private-window
Opera	--private
Chrome, Chromium, Brave, Vivaldi, Thorium, ungoogled-chromium, Arc	--incognito

A browser it doesn't recognise gets no private window rather than a guessed one: a wrong switch isn't ignored (Chromium reads it as an address, Firefox opens an error page). You can give a custom browser its own switch.

Settings › Browsers says next to each one whether it can open a private window.

Settings › Browsers

The page has two groups: Detected on this computer and Added by you. For each browser you can:

• Move it up or down: the order is the order in the picker, and the keys 1–9 follow it.
• Hide it from the picker without deleting it. A browser you never use for links (or a profile) stops taking a key.
• Duplicate it, to have the same browser twice with different arguments. For example, Chrome with --new-window, or a Firefox profile with -P Work.
• Edit it: name, arguments, private-window argument and icon. The executable path of a detected browser belongs to detection; a rescan would put it back.
• Remove it, only if you added it yourself. Rules that pointed to it are left without a destination, and will ask you again.

Adding a browser by hand

Add a browser asks for:

Field	What to put
Name	How it appears in the picker
Executable path (Windows) / Application path (.app) (Mac)	The program to start, for example C:\Tools\MyBrowser\browser.exe or /Applications/MyBrowser.app
Extra arguments	Anything added before the link. Put quotes around any argument with spaces
Private window argument	--incognito, -private-window… Without it, that browser can't open privately from the picker
Custom icon path	Optional, an image file

Useful for portable browsers, development builds, a second Firefox profile, or a browser the system doesn't register.

Installed a new browser?

Settings › Browsers › Look for browsers again (Look) reads the system once more and says how many are new and how many are gone. Detected browsers you had hidden show up again; the names, arguments, icons and order you gave them are kept, and so are the browsers you added by hand.

If a profile disappears

If you delete a Chromium profile that a rule points to, the next link for that rule says The profile … is no longer there and lets you pick another browser. Change or delete the rule in Settings › Rules.