Prevent IE takeover of default browser

Jul 08, '02 09:19:59AM

Contributed by: THEM

I have hopefully stumbled upon the reason IE hijacks the honor of being the default web browser at seemingly random times.

To see the potential cause of this, control-click on the Internet Explorer application and choose "Show Package Contents". Open the Contents folder and then open Info-macos.plist in your editor of choice. Near the bottom you'll see this key:

<key>CFBundleURLTypes</key>
Within that key is an array of values in the following form:
<key>CFBundleURLName</key>
<string>http URL</string>
<key>CFBundleURLSchemes</key>
<array>
<string>http</string>
</array>
<key>LSIsAppleDefaultForScheme</key>
<true/>
The final association is what we are worried about; LS is OS X's Launch Services which handles all the file typing and associations for the OS. Deleting these lines should prevent IE from hijacking your browser setting.

[Editor's note: I haven't had a hijacking problem in a few months (since 10.1.3, perhaps?). We've also covered other methods of preventing this hijacking in the past (1, 2); they all seemed to work for some people some of the time. So here's one more thing to try if IE continues to override your default browser settings.]

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