Applications in Safari and other browsers

In article ,
Robert Peirce wrote:

> I just added Bwana.app. If I type "man:" into the URL line in Safari or
> Firefox, both know that they have to open Bwana to process the request.
> How do they know that?

Launch Services: <http://developer.apple.com/technotes/tn/tn2017.html>.

Basically Mac OS X allows applications to 'tell the OS' that they can
handle a certain protocol. The moment you have the Finder show the
application, this info is registered by the OS (so even before the app
is launched, which played a role in this security issue a while ago:
<http://www.euronet.nl/~tekelenb/playground/security/URLschemes/>).

If the app is the only one (on that particular mac) claiming to handle
that protocol, it is registered as the default protocol helper. If there
are already other apps registered for that protocol, I'm not sure
exactly what logic is applied.

> When I installed Bwana.app, I just dragged it to where I wanted it, and
> that wasn't Applications. I didn't start it or do anything special, but
> when I entered the request, Safari knew what program to run and how to
> find it.

Actually, Safari/Firefox don't know what to do with that bwana: URL, so
they simply hand the URL on to the OS, which knows that Bwana claims to
be able to handle that, so passed it on to Bwana.

Nothing to do with Bwana or Safari or Firefox. Just Mac OS X.

> Seems like magic to me, but it I am sure it is just clever programming.

Yep

--
Sander Tekelenburg, <http://www.euronet.nl/~tekelenb/>

Mac user: "Macs only have 40 viruses, tops!"
PC user: "SEE! Not even the virus writers support Macs!"
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