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In Help chapter "Using a Web Browser With the IDE" writen: "You can open a web browser from the IDE in two ways: Choose View -> Web Browser (Ctrl-7) to open the browser to your home page. Choose Help ->Bookmarks -> web-site-name to open the browser to a predefined site. You can configure the IDE to use either the internal Swing HTML browser or an external web browser. " However SWING browser always opened via Ctrl-7 or via View->Web Browser. Your settings for default browser for IDE ignored. Well reproduced with S1S 4.1 build 020814
*** Issue 26638 has been marked as a duplicate of this issue. ***
View -> Web browser action raises window with browser and requests focus for it if it already exists. If it doesn't exists it opens browser using IDE settings. Thus if you open Swing browser and then change your settings it will always use Swing browser. Your new settings will be applied when you close the browser and restart the IDE.