is there a way to prevent all the other apps on the system from opening up new tabs/windows in firefox?
You can set some browser-unrelated program or script as your desktop environment's default browser, for example I wrote a Zsh script that creates a KDE dialog and asks me to copy the URL to the clipboard.
I'm not currently at my PC, but if you want it I can paste it in a comment here when I get to it - it shouldn't be too hard to translate it to Bash, either.
Other than that?
/usr/bin/true
is a pretty nice default browser for applications to start without your consent, very minimal and lightweight.Here it is:
#!/usr/bin/zsh nl=$'\n' dnl=$'\n\n' url=$1 msgcontent=$url; shift argi=1 for arg ($@); do argi=$(($argi + 1)) msgcontent=${msgcontent}${nl}Argument\ ${argi}': '${arg} done title="${0:A}" msg="An application attempted to open a web page:${dnl}\"${msgcontent}\"${dnl}Copy the URL to clipboard?" kdialog --title $title --yesno $msg answer=$? if [[ $answer = 0 ]]; then wl-copy $url; fi
If you want to translate it to Bash, keep in mind that arrays behave differently between the two shells, and syntax like
for arg ($@); do
would likely misbehave or not work at all.Also, there's an issue where some applications do something weird, and the URL seems to be a zero-length argument. I have absolutely no idea what's up with that.
I set Junction as my default browser, this software has been a game changer for me. https://apps.gnome.org/fr/Junction/