It''s not going to be that simple. If you application is associated with one of the big desktop environments (Gnome or KDE) it''s pretty easy, as they both have settings to tell you what the default browser is. Debian has an alternatives system that ensures that certain "generic" executables always exist that call the correct program (a couple being: sensible-browser, www-browser, and x-www-browser) but, as far as I know, no other distributions do it quite the same way (but some have similar mechanisms, of course).

So, what most applications end up doing that are not associated with any desktop environment is provide a means for the user to select what browser to use (provide a list of the common ones: mozilla, galeon, epiphany, konqueror, opera, netscape, "sensible-browser" and possibly links and lynx -- cull what doesn''t exist in PATH -- as well as a "custom" enter-whatever-you-want).

If you want to get more fancy, you can link at runtime to the two big desktop environment libraries and use their features after detecting which the user is currently running using some heuristic-type approach and/or detect the various distributions'' sensible-browser type of executables. (This probably wouldn''t be all that hard, but I''ve never tried it; maybe I will later...)

quote:Original post by Turt99
So from your information it sounds to me that first step would be to figure out the browser to use, then open that browser, I would assume that it would just go to the home page then and I''d have to figure a way to send it a messages to go to a different page..

Just pass the page as the second parameter (after the executable name) on the command line you start it with and every browser should know to show that page. Once you know the executable you want to use it isn''t that difficult.

If I do get around to writing some robust detector code I''ll post it somewhere for you.

Try using libcurl to do it from within your own code, no browser needed.

http://curl.sourceforge.net/libcurl/

And if you don't like libcurl itself, that page has a link to several other http client libraries.

- dorix

edit: clickety click, Barba trick


[edited by - dorix on December 15, 2003 1:49:34 PM]

Okay, got around to writing the beginning of a moderately robust "browser detection" example (and put it here). It checks for the BROWSER environment variable, then checks for gconfd (which is linked and checked for Gnome settings if it''s running), then it checks for distro-specific scripts, and finally just runs checks a list of common browsers. It shouldn''t return any invalid options (NULL if there''s no options), so the first value in the array returned is probably what is the best choice. One could probably add support for KDE and such too, I just didn''t do it.

Rethinking a bit, Dorix is probably correct about doing it in-process if possible. If the webpage is meant to be anything interactive it probably isn''t an easy option though.

CWizard: yeah, I forgot about that (support for it is in the example source I uploaded, like I said). It seems that it''s not set too commonly from my experience; I couldn''t say how few or how many applications pay attention to it though (I know Abiword does, which is why I knew about it, but that''s the only one I can think of off hand; I''m sure there''s more).