Can Java's Desktop library launch a URL in a new Browser Tab or Window?

Question

I have a static method used to launch a browser with a given URL. When the browser is already open, this takes over the active browser window.

This is a problem if t

Answer 1

Under Windows, there is a way to find what the default browser is. You will have to use the commands

REG QUERY HKCR\.html /ve

which would return

! REG.EXE VERSION 3.0

HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.html
       REG_SZ  FirefoxHTML

Then you would query FirefoxHTML (or whatever value was returned) using the same command, and append the following to the key

REG QUERY HKCR\FirefoxHTML\shell\open\command /ve

and this would return

! REG.EXE VERSION 3.0

HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\FirefoxHTML\shell\open\command
       REG_SZ  "C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe" -requestPending -osint -url "%1"

From here, you can parse the returned lines to grab the location of the browser executable.

You can do all this using the Java Runtime class:

Runtime.getRuntime.exec(cmdString);

This requires a lot of customized coding, but you could essentially create your own API to access the default browser under Windows.

Here is an example of accessing the Windows registry in Java.

You could also search Google for more information on finding default browser in the registry.

As for other platforms (Mac, Linux, etc), I am sure there is a specific way to get the path to the default browser.

Hope this helps!