System wide browser protocol handlers?

Solution 1:

With GNOME 3.0 and Ubuntu 11.10, things changed compared to the accepted answer to this question.

You can find more details at "Creating custom URL handlers in Ubuntu 11.04, 11.10, GNOME 3.0".

Solution 2:

Not system-wide. But the Gnome registry thingy has entries for that. Use gconf-editor and edit sub entries for /desktop/gnome/url-handlers. See also here http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=710780&postcount=6

KDE obviously has a different URI handler database. There is also xdg-open worth looking into. But I'm not sure if it uses a standardized handler database, or if freedesktop.org is working on it. Sparse docs.

Personally I wish they would just use the xdg-mime (and application) database for that. There are pseudo uri/* types in it anyway. And it was somewhat more systematic if you could define handler applications and preference lists for them like with regular MIME types. </rant>