Set the Default Browser on the Mac

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Learn how to set which browser your Mac uses by default.

In this tip for the Mac, I show you how you can set with browser your Mac uses by default. You do this through the General Preference Pane in the Mac’s System Preferences. Once you download a new browser, you can easily set your Mac to use that browser by default, or if you set a browser to use by default and you would like to set Safari back as your default browser, through this General Preference Pane. See how to se the Mac’s default browser in this tip for the Mac.

Video Transcript (video also has closed captions):

In this video, we’re going to take a look at how you can change the default browser your Mac uses. Let’s go to my Mac to change your default browser, or even to see what your default browser is. What you need to do is you need to open up your System Preferences. So I’m going to go down to my System Preferences.

It’s located in my Dock. You can also go to your Apple Menu. I click on it. And I’m looking at my system preferences. Your system preferences may look a little different if you’re using an older version of macOS, I’m using macOS Catalina. So they changed the sup slightly. They’ve reduced the number of categories of preference pains.

Either way. All you need to do is go over to general. All of the system preferences. It doesn’t matter which macOS use, and they all have a general preference pane. When I click on it. We have an option for default browser. This is how I can see which default browser I’m using. I’m using Safari here.

If I wanted to change it, I click on it and select which browser I want to use. You do have to have that browser installed. So I have all of these different browsers installed. So if you do not see your browser, let’s say you downloaded Google Chrome, and you want to use it as your default browser.

If you don’t see it here, that means you haven’t downloaded it and open it up yet. So the first thing you’ll need to do before you can change it to a different browser is download it. Now, in some cases, when you download a browser, that browser, when you first open it up, we’ll ask you if you want to use that browser as your max default browser, Google Chrome, does this, if you hit, yes, what’s going to happen is your Mac is going to use Google Chrome as its default browser.

If you hit that accidentally and you want to bring it back to Safari, this is where you can change back to Safari from another browser such as Google, Chrome, or Firefox. So that’s how it can see what a default browser is as well as set.

What a default browser will be when we click on a link and another app such as mail, we go to our system preferences, go to general, and then you’re going to see default web browser. From there, you select the browser you want to use. You do have to have that browser installed to be able to select it.

If you inadvertently selected a different browser as your default browser, you can always switch it back to Safari. So that’s how we can see as well as set, which browser are Mac uses when we click on a link.

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