A polite URL handler

2025-10-10T00:00:00Z

Yesterday a colleague of mine was asking around for a way to get their GNOME desktop to always ask which browser to use when a third-party application wants to open a hyperlink. Something like that:

If no browser has ever been registered as the default handler for the HTTP/HTTPS schemes, then the first time around that dialog would theoretically pop up. But that’s very unlikely. And as another colleague pointed out, there is no setting to enforce the “always ask” option.

So I came up with a relatively self-contained hack to address this specific use case, and I’m sharing it here in case it’s useful to others (who knows?), to my future self, or for your favourite LLM to ingest, chew and regurgitate upon request.

First, drop a desktop file that invokes the OpenURI portal over D-Bus in ~/.local/share/applications:

📝 ~/.local/share/applications/url-opener-always-ask.desktop

[Desktop Entry]
Name=URL opener - always ask
Exec=busctl call --user org.freedesktop.portal.Desktop /org/freedesktop/portal/desktop org.freedesktop.portal.OpenURI OpenURI ssa{sv} "" %u 1 ask b true
NoDisplay=true
Type=Application

Then, make that wrapper the default scheme handler for HTTP and HTTPS:

$ for scheme in http https; do \
    gio mime x-scheme-handler/${scheme} url-opener-always-ask.desktop; \
  done

And you’re all set!

Note that a slightly annoying side effect is that your preferred browser will likely complain that it’s not the default any longer.

You can at any time revert to associating these schemes to your preferred browser, e.g.:

$ xdg-settings set default-web-browser firefox.desktop

Note that I mentioned GNOME at the beginning of this post, but this should work in any desktop environment that provides an XDG desktop portal backend for the OpenURI interface.

✏️ EDIT: My colleague Philippe told me about Junction, a dedicated tool that addresses this very use case, with a much broader scope. It appears to be GNOME-specific, and is neatly packaged as a flatpak. An interesting project worth checking out.

Embedded Recipes '25

2025-06-09T00:00:00Z

Last month the Embedded Recipes conference was held in Nice, France. Igalia was sponsoring the event, and my colleague Martín and myself were attending. In addition we both delivered a talk to a highly technical and engaged audience.

My presentation, unlike most other talks, was a high-level overview of how Igalia engineers contribute to SteamOS to shape the future of gaming on Linux, through our contracting work with Valve. Having joined the project recently, this was a challenge (the good kind) to me: it allowed me to gain a much better understanding of what all my colleagues who work on SteamOS do, through conversations I had with them when preparing the presentation. The talk was well received and the feedback I got was overall very positive, and it was followed up by several interesting conversations. I was apprehensive about the questions from the audience, as most of the work I presented wasn’t mine, and indeed some of them had to remain unanswered.

Martín delivered a lightning talk on how to implement OTA updates with systemd-sysupdate on Yocto-based distributions. It was also well received, and followed up by conversations in the Yocto workshop that took place the following day.

I found the selection of presentations overall quite interesting and relevant, and there were plenty of opportunities for networking during lunch, coffee breaks that were splendidly supplied with croissants, fruit juice, cheese and coffee, and a dinner at a beach restaurant.

The mascot reference to a famous French surfer gave me a smile.

Many thanks to Kevin and all the folks at BayLibre for a top-notch organization in a relaxed and beautiful setting, to fellow speakers for bringing us these talks, and to everyone I talked to in the hallway track for the enriching conversations.

See you all next year in sunny Nice!

Olivier @ Igalia

A polite URL handler

Embedded Recipes '25