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Macs- Please make the client use the default browser instead of Safari

Direwolfiez·9/15/2014, 7:08:40 PM·2 votes·1,563 views

I would highly appreciate it if this could be implemented. I'm using a Mac for LoL until my new processor gets here, and honestly, once I found out that if you clicked links on the client it opens them through Safari, I just stopped clicking the links, no matter how interested I was in them. I don't think very highly of Safari, and it's my opinion that it's poorly designed. That said, why isn't it standard to launch the links in the computer's default browser? I'm not saying that people shouldn't be able to use Safari to open links from the client, I just don't appreciate being forced to use it.

If I could get a red response that would also be highly appreciated. I'll understand if there's a reason why such a feature can't be implemented, but otherwise I can't think of a reason why it shouldn't be in place. Being forced to use a browser you don't like isn't that great, and it can impact whether or not people look at the content that you, Riot, share with us.

2 Comments

Kao Atlantis9/15/2014, 8:31:48 PM3 votes

This actually has less to do with how the League of Legends client works, than how Mac OS X works with the default browser. This is a problem with almost every third-party application that opens links externally, including Adobe Air, which is what Riot's PVP.net client is built on. Current versions of Mac OS determine the default browser from Safari's settings because of how Safari is built into the OS. When a link is called from an external program, it doesn't always open the correct browser because of how Safari behaves in this situation.

Windows doesn't have this problems as it doesn't have Internet Explorer built in to the system anymore, so it has to handle links a bit differently. This is because in 2001 in a court battle (United States v. Microsoft Corp), Microsoft was forced to unbundle Internet Explorer from their system, and build in a feature that got Windows itself to manage which browser was the one the user wanted by default.

I am sure Riot could force the client to figure out what your default browser is and get it to open (and maybe they will), but that would add a bunch of extra stuff to the client that could just go wrong.

Good news though! In the upcoming version of Mac OS X 10.10 (Yosemite), Apple changed how the default browser is handled. They built the default browser into the system settings instead of into Safari's settings. League of Legends, and all other applications that open links externally will now automatically launch your default browser instead of Safari.

There is a workaround for the current and older versions of OS X:

  1. Make sure Safari has Firefox set as your default browser.
  2. Open Safari.
  3. Click "Safari" menu then click "Preferences."
  4. Go to the "General" tab.
  5. Choose your desired browser from the "Default web browser" pop-up menu.
  6. Set HTML files to open in Firefox manually.
  7. Right click on any .html file and click "Get Info." *Note: If you you need to make an HTML file for this process, look at the highlighted steps below and come back to this.
  8. Go down to the "Open With" section and select the browser you want.
  9. Click "Change All."

*If you need to make an html file to change your defaults:

  1. Open your "TextEdit" program that comes with your Mac.
  2. Leave the page blank and select, "File" then "Save..."
  3. Set the "File Format" to "Web Page (.html)"
  4. Set "Where:" to your Desktop, or another place you'll remember.
  5. In the "Save As:" box type "blank.html" and push "Save."
  6. Go back to step 2 above.

Hope that helps. :)