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I would like to create a file that when double clicked launches a website in the default web browser. I have found that .desktop files can do this, but apparently they no longer work in Ubuntu 22.04.

How can this be done?

user171780
  • 566

1 Answers1

3

You can use an html file that launches in the default browser and immediately redirects to your target website with the http-equiv=refresh attribute on the <meta> element. The target website address goes to the content attribute which must be a non-negative integer followed by the string ';url=', and your URL. The integer is the number of seconds until the page should redirect - in this case 0 is a convenient value.

If you have a link to your website on a page in Firefox, you can actually drag the link and drop it on the desktop to create such a file (this is how I accidentally found this solution while playing around with links and desktop launcher files). Or, create the file manually.

For example the following file will open and redirect to askubuntu.com:

<html>
  <head>
    <meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0; url=https://askubuntu.com" />
  </head>
<body></body>
</html>
balage
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