There are many extensions in the Chrome store that launch an email dialog window using the default email client to send the URL of the current tab in an email message. I’ve tried virtually every one, and they all appear to use the same mechanism and behave the same. One example would be the extension Mailto.
The basic operation is this: you click the extension button (or right-click on the tab and select it from a context menu). An email edit window pops up with the tab’s URL in the body (and sometimes the tab’s title on the subject line.
I’ve tested these URL emailing extensions in Chromium and a number of Chromium-based browsers. They all work flawlessly in Chromium, Opera, and Vivaldi, and always have (various versions of the browsers and OS over many years). However, I have never been able to get them to work properly in Brave. The precise manifestation depends on the distro version I run Brave in.
I tried Brave maybe a year ago (the standard Brave version available at that time), on a system running MX Linux v19.4 (Debian 10), Use of any URL mailer extension produced an error message every time and I gave up, since the problem was unique to Brave. I’m trying Brave again (v1.43.93 Chromium 105.0.5195.127). On a computer still running MX v19.4 (updated), launching the Mailto function produces a pop-up system dialog asking:
Open xdg-open?
chrome-extension:[extension identifier] wants to open this application.
[_] Always allow chrome-extension:[extension identifier] to open links of this type in the associated app[Open xdg-open] (button)
Clicking the button does nothing but close the dialog window.
Another computer is running MX 21.2 ahs (Debian 11). On that computer, clicking the [Open xdg-open] button does launch the email window, so that part does work, albeit with the extra steps of the system dialog. However, the option to always allow it doesn’t work (it produces the same dialog window every time, making it a multi-step process to mail a URL). Although it sorta works on one computer, I don’t want to have to use and maintain a different browser on the other computer (emailing URLs is a very frequent requirement).
Although the problem manifests differently depending on versions, it happens at all only in Brave.
There have been some earlier question generally related to this issue, but I couldn’t find an exact match, or an earlier solution that helps in this case.