Changing the default browser by hand
Normally this is not something one has to worry about – unless of course one wants to use Google Chrome Portable or something like that.
Portable Chrome fails to set itself as default browser! It manages to configure itself to open HTML files, but it doesn't use the “portable” wrapper executable for this.
The “correct” way to change default browser is to use the Default Programs
application, which is buried somewhere in the depths of the start menu. Of course
this won't work for portable apps that the OS doesn't know about yet.
As some badly written blog post informs me, the default URL handlers are stored
in the registry at
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\
;
the ...\
keys refer to programs defined in the
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\
hierarchy. If Chrome has already attempted (and
failed, probably) to register itself, there will be a a corresponding class named
ChromeHTML.*
there.
Make sure the <Class>\shell\open\command\
key refers to (e.g.)
...\
and not ...\App\Chrome-bin\chrome.exe
!
When a suitable class is defined, it can be inserted into the ...\UrlAssociations
hierarchy at the appropriate places.
It is also probably necessary to change some file associations (*.html and whatnot) but this is certainly easiest from the Windows shell.