Set Chrome as Default Browser from Command Line

By  on  

Whenever I see a desktop GUI to accomplish a given web-related task, I'm dying to know the underlying operating system interaction to accomplish the same feat.  Many of the GUIs I use are just a front for a command line utility for that more experienced developers would use.

I set out to find the command line script for setting the system's default browser on OS X but apparently there isn't one, but I did find a command line script for setting Chrome as the default browser:

open -a "Google Chrome" --args --make-default-browser

The script above opens Google Chrome and asks for confirmation that you'd like to make it the default browser.  I'm not aware of what command line scripts would make other browsers the default browser, and I'm a bit annoyed that there isn't a single script to do so!

Recent Features

  • By
    Facebook Open Graph META Tags

    It's no secret that Facebook has become a major traffic driver for all types of websites.  Nowadays even large corporations steer consumers toward their Facebook pages instead of the corporate websites directly.  And of course there are Facebook "Like" and "Recommend" widgets on every website.  One...

  • By
    Creating Scrolling Parallax Effects with CSS

    Introduction For quite a long time now websites with the so called "parallax" effect have been really popular. In case you have not heard of this effect, it basically includes different layers of images that are moving in different directions or with different speed. This leads to a...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    JavaScript Canvas Image Conversion

    At last week's Mozilla WebDev Offsite, we all spent half of the last day hacking on our future Mozilla Marketplace app. One mobile app that recently got a lot of attention was Instagram, which sold to Facebook for the bat shit crazy price of one...

  • By
    Display Images as Grayscale with CSS Filters

    CSS filters aren't yet widely supported but they are indeed impressive and a modern need for web imagery.  CSS filters allow you to modify the display of images in a variety of ways, one of those ways being displaying images as grayscale. Doing so requires the...

Discussion

  1. Too bad that still prompts you to accept the make default browser action/choice. That kind of detracts from the ability to fully automate system provisioning for instance. :(

  2. Danie

    Or simply go here:

    OS X Yosemite:
    1 – From the Apple menu, choose System Preferences, then click General.
    2 – Click the “Default web browser” pop-up menu and choose a web browser, like Safari.

    OS X Mavericks or earlier:
    1 – Open Safari from the Applications folder, Dock, or Launchpad.
    2 – From the Safari menu, choose Preferences.
    3 – Click the General button.
    4 – Choose a web browser from the “Default web browser” pop-up menu, like Safari.

Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!