I’ve recently wanted to test out Chrome Canary. While the current ECMAScript 6 compatibility is not much different from stable release Chrome, it’s always nice to have handy for potential testing and checking out new features.

As Chrome Canary is not available for Linux, I had to dust off my MacBook Pro to install it. Then, when I went in to Settings in Chrome Canary, I saw this message:

Fair enough.. except in some cases it would be really nice to be able to set it as default. Especially when opening many local files for testing.

Chrome Canary as default browser in OS X

But despair not! You can override this in OS X by going to System Preferences > General, and setting the default browser manually to Chrome Canary:

Chrome as default browser in Ubuntu

This issue reminded me of a similar problem when recently switching to Ubuntu as my Linux distro. I installed regular Google Chrome, and chose to set it to default browser from within the Chrome settings. Yet Firefox still remained the default browser for me.

So after some googling, it turned out that you can only set default browser from within Ubuntu’s own settings. You do this by going to System Settings > Details > Default Applications, and setting it there: