Is there a way to stop Dropbox from opening Firefox as its default when viewing the Dropbox webpage?

Question

I have Dropbox installed on my Ubuntu desktop 12.10, I also have Firefox and Chrome installed. Chrome is my default browser, I have checked in my mimeapps.list and its all correct. Yet for some reason the integration of Dropbox opens Firefox when I use the "Launch Dropbox website" option from the menu, is there a file somewhere this is looking at as I would like it to open in Chrome which I mostly have already running than launching a new instance of Firefox? Or could this be a Dropbox bug?

Answer 1

I had similar problem with my Xubuntu 13.04 and I solve it with this commands.

$ sudo update-alternatives --config x-www-browser

  Selection    Path                Priority   Status
------------------------------------------------------------
  0            /usr/bin/opera              200       auto mode
* 1            /usr/bin/chromium-browser   40        manual mode
  2            /usr/bin/firefox            40        manual mode
  3            /usr/bin/opera              200       manual mode

Press enter to keep the current choice[*], or type selection number:

x-www-browser was set right because I want to use chromium-browser but problem was with next command where for gnome-www-browser was set opera.

$ sudo update-alternatives --config gnome-www-browser

    Selection    Path                Priority   Status
------------------------------------------------------------
* 0            /usr/bin/opera              200       auto mode
  1            /usr/bin/chromium-browser   40        manual mode
  2            /usr/bin/firefox            40        manual mode
  3            /usr/bin/opera              200       manual mode

Press enter to keep the current choice[*], or type selection number:

So you just need to select the browser you want to use, in my case its chromium-browser, so I entered number 1 and it solve my problem with Lunch Dropbox Website in different browser.

Answer 2

Dropbox is still a gtk2 application while Unity and current Gnome are on gtk3. Gtk2 applications store their settings in gconf instead of dconf. Maybe they got out of sync.

Edit the following key:

/desktop/gnome/applications/browser/exec

with the gconf-editor user interface (available as package) or with gconf command:

gconftool -s /desktop/gnome/applications/browser/exec -t string google-chrome

Last not least there are the debian alternatives system, use package galternatives and change key x-www-browser to your liking.

Note that google-chrome is not the same as chromium-browser.

It is also possible that dropbox keeps the browser that it encountered during install, in this case please report the bug.