Opening links

A link in a task or a note opens in whichever browser your system opens links in. Settings → Links can try to change that — and the honest description of what it does is try.

What a web page cannot do

Two things, and they set the limits of this feature:

• It cannot see which browsers are installed. The list is deliberately closed: it would be a fingerprint, distinctive enough to follow somebody from site to site.
• It cannot ask the system to use a particular one. A link goes to the default browser, and there is no API that says otherwise.

The only handle that exists is the URL schemes browsers register for themselves — firefox://open-url?url=…, googlechrome://…, microsoft-edge:… — and there is no way to ask whether one exists. You can only try it.

So the setting is an attempt

Pick Safari, Chrome, Firefox or Edge, or write your own scheme. When you click a link, that scheme is tried first; if nothing has happened within about half a second, the link opens the ordinary way.

The fallback is the whole reason this is safe to turn on. Without it, a setting that works on your phone would leave links doing nothing on your desktop.

In practice: it works on a phone, where browsers register these schemes, and rarely on a Mac or a PC, where Chrome and Firefox do not. Edge on Windows is the usual exception. There is a Prøv det button for exactly this reason — you cannot ask whether a scheme exists, so it is better to find out on example.dk than on a link you meant to follow.

Writing your own

Three placeholders, because browsers disagree about the shape they want the address in:

{url}	The address as it is — x-safari-https://example.dk
{encoded}	The address as a parameter value — firefox://open-url?url=https%3A%2F%2F…
{stripped}	The address without the https:// — googlechrome://example.dk

It belongs to the machine, not the account

The choice is kept in the browser you are sitting at, not on your account — the same rule the sidebar's width follows. firefox:// works on the phone and does nothing on the Mac, so a choice that followed the account would be wrong in one of the two places every time.