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Comment by MatthewPhillips | Hacker News Reader

Defaulting is not enough. It has to be easy to switch to another. On my Android phone I have 5 web browsers installed. If I add a bookmark to the homescreen it asks me which web browser I want to use to open it. Every time I click on it.

I could, as you suggest, set a default, but if I do that then that browser owns all of my links and the only way to change it is to hunt down the setting to disable the default (which is buried in the settings UI I suppose).

So I live with the (extreme annoyance) of clicking on a link within the browser that then prompts me which browser I'd like to use to open it.

Getting the UX right on this is by far the most important part of the project.

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This is a problem every major desktop OS solved years ago, by making the settings in a convenient and readily-accessible place, both for one-time overrides and changing the defaults (right-click -> Open With or similar). Hopefully the folks implementing this come up with something similarly usable.

No offense but your an edge case. Most users will have only 1 main browser they use.

Well Google itself ships two browsers-- Browser and Chrome, and Chrome is default almost nowhere, so it is an issue for almost every Google target user.

I too agree with this. Though web intents is really good and necessity for web but UX, by far, is the key for this. Just on the side note - there will be lots of other services (like translate etc) which would be intentified, and anything other than providing in-line UX will kill intuitiveness.

I don't think we disagree with the need for a strong user experience, and this will happen over time as everyone learns how users, developers and publishers use the system.

We do have an inline disposition, but it is not as in-page inline as I think you are suggesting, and even then it is up to the service how it chooses to be opened.

> and this will happen over time as everyone learns how users, developers and publishers use the system.

That right there says to me that UX is not the focus and it absolutely should be. Don't ship a feature that you haven't figured out the UX for.

UX is the focus, however we will still learn what happens as more users use it.

I'm annoyed by the exact same thing. Chrome Beta is good, but it is still a beta. For some sites, I've found the built-in browser to be better. A proper UX solution, in my opinion, would be using a 3-4 seconds dialog ("Opening with Chrome") with a Change button. That way, you can change the default app at the moment you notice it. Of course, it comes with a delay, so it wouldn't work well for others.

A 3-4 second delay on every app launch? No way.

Replacing the currently indefinite delay with a 3-4 second one sounds like an improvement.

That only works if you launch the wrong app every time. Extremely unlikely.

I'd rather see a long tap bring up options related to a shortcut.

It's less discoverable than a delay, but it is also far less annoying in the common case.

> On my Android phone I have 5 web browsers installed.

For what percentage of users is this likely to be a concern?

I get that popup whenever a file can be handled by multiple apps (youtube links: browser or native app, images: browser or some editor/viewer, etc.).

It happens occasionally to me and I'm not a smartphone "power user".

I would think that for a set of common intents, most users have more than 1 app that can handle it. It is bad UX to ask every time, and it's also bad UX to force them to choose 1 forever. I don't know what the solution is.

This is why I can't wait for more integrated speech/command based interfaces. It is great for infrequently used commands: "change this icon to open with safari." Only someone highly experienced with the details of a UI are going to be able to change settings faster than they can say them.

Surely this depends on the browser, rather than the mechanism in HTML itself?

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