Why does slickedit for linux launch firefox instead of my default browser?

[greggman]

No, I don't want to go hack help.e to fix it. I'm asking because I'd like to see slickedit launch the user's default browser out of the box.

Can this be fixed upstream?

[Dennis]

You can configure it by going to Tools > Options... > Network and Internet Options > Web Browser Setup.

Unlike Windows and MacOS, Linux has not traditionally had a default web browser OS setting, other than Firefox, well, before that really Mozilla, being a defacto default web browser.

Now, some Linux distributions (inconsistently) honor the $BROWSER environment variable.  Some use xdg-settings.   Some use update-alternatives.  Some just fall back on MIME type settings for text/html.

Anyway, I'll file a feature request to update our default web browser selection code for Linux.

[greggman]

Sadly that doesn't work.

I picked Chrome, the path is correct. I picked Help->Contents. It launched Mozilla :-(

[Dennis]

Yes, of course, that's what it will do for the help.  The help system was written for Mozilla and tested with Mozilla.  That's what it expects to use.  Given the peculiarities of different browsers, I would not expect it to work consistently well with other web browsers.  At some point in the future, we'll have a native help system on Unix so we can do away with all this.

The web browser setting is for when you open a URL from within a document in SlickEdit.

[greggman]

That's a pretty unsatisfactory excuse. Millions of websites all over the net seem to have no problem making cross browser webpages. It's not hard and there's certainly nothing about Slickedit's help system that is using any crazy mozilla only browser features that shouldn't work in nearly any browser.

Please don't continue this excuse. You guys are better than that.

[chrisant]

@greggman, that's unfair.  It takes a huge amount of time and energy to author web content that's compatible across all browsers.  In fact some companies recently have dropped support for some browsers because it's so expensive.  Do some research on the interwebs about the cost of HTML compatibility across browsers.

A couple quick examples plucked at random from the interwebs in under 10 seconds:
Google dropped support for some "old" browsers in common use
Some discussion on LinkedIn about browser support -- especially see post from Ravi D
Do some quick searches to learn more about cost of cross-browser support.