While developing the Taverna myExperiment plugin we needed some way of launching a browser when clicking on a link. Launching a browser is fairly easy using Runtime.exec(“firefox”, URL); However, how do you know what browsers are installed and what the default one is. Step forward BrowserLauncher2 (http://browserlaunch2.sourceforge.net/).
BrowserLauncher launcher = new BrowserLauncher();
launcher.openURLinBrowser("http://www.google.com");
Job done.