Wednesday, January 13, 2021

Setting Your Default Web Browser on Big Sur

Jeff Johnson:

macOS 11 Big Sur has a bug that prevents some apps from appearing in the “Default web browser” menu in the General pane of System Preferences, which of course makes it difficult to set one of those apps as your default web browser.

[…]

The developer API for changing your default web browser still works correctly on Big Sur. My workaround is to call that API from the python command-line tool[…]

[…]

It’s important to keep in mind that this workaround does not fix the “Default web browser” menu in System Preferences. In fact, even after you change your default web browser to Link Unshortener, it still won’t appear in the menu, which will incorrectly show Safari as the default web browser.

It’s odd that 2020’s iOS and macOS releases both contained (different) bugs related to setting default apps.

Why doesn’t he just call the API from his app? Because the app is in the Mac App Store, and the API doesn’t work from sandboxed apps.

Previously:

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