Rob van der Woude's Scripting Pages

Batch How To ...

Check the default browser

Checking the default browser manually is easy: run

START ms-settings:defaultapps

and take a look at the Web browser setting.

Or run

START http://?

to open the default browser with its default (home) page(s), and check.

 

The true challenge is to get the default browser without human interaction.

 

I have seen many techniques and registry keys mentioned on the web, but so far none was reliable.
They all keep telling me my default browser is Internet Explorer, and I can assure you it isn't!

Techniques using ASSOC (which actually searches HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Classes\.html) and using its result in FTYPE (searches HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Classes\ with ASSOC result appended, e.g. HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Classes\htmlfile) did work back in the Windows XP and 7 era, but they no longer do in Windows 10.

Joe Caverly and Steve Robertson provided me with the "new" registry value locations: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\FileExts\.html\UserChoice\ProgID for local HTML files, and HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Shell\Associations\UrlAssociations\http\UserChoice\ProgID for http(s) URLs.

This will return values like FirefoxHTML-308046B0AF4A39CB.
To get the executable path, look in HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT, e.g. HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\FirefoxHTML-308046B0AF4A39CB\shell\open\command which will return the path to the default browser's executable, e.g. "C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe".

Note: Unlike REG.EXE, PowerShell cannot read directly from HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT, it would require WMI to access that hive.
However, a "copy" of HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT can be found in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes.

See GetDefaultBrowser.bat for more details.


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