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.