After I installed Google Chrome on my work laptop, Pidgin links open with Chrome even though Firefox is set as my default browser.  Pidgin is using sensible-browser to open links.  How can I get sensible-browser to use the default browser?I found a couple of posts about similar problems here and here but the solutions seemed to be run a bunch of random commands and one of them might possibly fix the issue.  I need to understand what the underlying problem is before I can take any steps to fix it.
How to prevent Google Chrome from circumventing the default browser settings?
firefox;chrome;browser;alternatives
sensible-browser does the following:if the BROWSER environment variable contains anything, it splits the value using : and each substring is tried as a candidate for a browser (so you can set BROWSER to be your favourite browser's executable);if you're running GNOME, it tries running gnome-www-browser, which you can configure using update-alternatives --config gnome-www-browser (as root) to point to your favourite browser;if that fails, or you're not running GNOME, it tries running x-www-browser, which you can configure using update-alternatives --config x-www-browser (as root) to point to your favourite browser;if that fails, it tries running www-browser, which you can configure using update-alternatives --config www-browser (as root) to point to your favourite browser (but it's supposed to be a text-mode browser such as Lynx or W3M).None of the alternatives take their value from your desktop environment's default; that explains why they ignore the browser you've configured.