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Comment by MereInterest | Hacker News Reader

So, if you want to override the users choice of browser, it's acceptable if you first replace "https://" with "microsoft-edge://" ? They're doing the exact same behavior, just with two steps instead of one.

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I mean if I specified "firefox://" should that be overwritten too?

Yeah? Isn't the part before the colon just specifying the protocol? So shouldn't the software that I direct to open URLs be the software that...opens URLs?

I'm in no way defending what Microsoft is doing here, but I would like to be able to have different clients for http:// & ftp://. Segregating client software by protocol makes perfect sense

Completely agreed, and this is why conflating protocols and programs is really obnoxious. This seems really common in proprietary software, where the conflation is deliberate, no protocol spec is defined, and the implication is that no other programs can interact with the protocol. (E.g. "zoommtg://" referring both to a software client and to a protocol.)

This is what you get when OSs allow protocol handlers but not URL handlers. It would be totally fine if you could install Zoom and then zoom.us links would open Zoom but this is what we get on the desktop.

A protocol shouldn't be specifying the client software in the first place. That's sort of the entire point of a protocol, that it can be implemented in multiple different clients.

So to answer your question, yes. If a program is specifying "firefox://" and using it to mean "https://", then that should be considered a bug in the program specifying it. That bug can either be fixed in the program itself, or can have a workaround in an external program.

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