@Chocoholic
Yeah it is only specific to Android, Desktop is a little weird with it since it carries technology from decades ago.
Phones target has always been opening in apps so everything was built around protocols and apps opening them. Android even let’s you see which protocols each app supports, so when you click on it, it will ask you or it will open the app automatically.
So that’s the default behavior in Android even inside Browsers, you open a youtube link, and it will open the app associated with it automatically.
So that option in settings, Video Playback in Brave overrides that but only inside the browser, but it works in any link, like twitter and amazon and whatever, even with that description about “video sites”.
But Android has always allowed you to individually change things as well, like if you have 3 apps to open youtube links, you can have a default one or Android ask you where you want to open it if that’s what you want.
Desktop computer have always been different because it was made decades ago, so nothing of this existed, you got an extension jpg, pdf, etc etc, double clicked and you got to the app associated with it and if you have more than 1 app, you get asked unless you set one as default.
With windows 8+ they have pushed more the use of protocols because of the Windows apps. So in a way, it acts similar, or they try to make Windows more like be able to handle all these things. The easiest example I can give you is go to Microsoft app Store website and click on “get” on any app, you will be asked if you want to open the link in Microsoft Store, that’s because it has the ms-windows-store://
so you can just type and go to ms-windows-store:// in the browser and you will get the same message, because Windows knows the protocol so it ask you in the only app which that protocol is registered to.
If you go to windows settings and check the extensions and protocols and you see apps with URL:
it means when you type it on the address bar it will ask you for their respective default application, zune://
will ask you for MS Store as well, msnews:// will ask to open News app and so on.
If we talk about browsers features and capabilities, Outlook is a good example, for example, I get this “page wants to install a service handler” and then is listed here brave://settings/handlers
and you can set it as default, if you make it default when you click in an email address it will open Outlook directly and you author an email right there, if you disable it or remove it, it will ask you if you want to open the Mail app (I don’t have any other email client), and you can even set it as “default” to always open the mail app.
So if websites wanted, like youtube, they would have the same handlers capabilities, like to click on youtube links and open browser app automatically.
But then we also have the PWA, which in a way adds one more way to associate protocols and file extensions to something.
For example you can test this one https://excalidraw.com/ it will register the file extension .EXCALIDRAW
And if you go to brave://apps/
and you right-click on Excalidraw and go to settings, you will see it has the “Include this app as an option when opening files”, so it can be used for any pdf PWA reader or anything.
So as you can see, in Desktop, things are kind of messy, you can open links in apps or in the browser, you can install PWAs that can handle files, etc etc.
Everything gets written to registry, so it is not hard to know what the OS is doing, but I am sure if more desktop apps appeared opening youtube links as protocol, then you would get asked, but as you can see, it is not common to find that, not even the youtube PWA has a way to open like youtube links, which would have been interesting.
So you don’t get the problem of opening links like on Android, and it seems the only setting close to that Video Playback would be the handlers one brave://settings/handlers since you can choose between opening links inside the browser vs an app like mail, but I only know Outlook using it, no clue which other app might offer that.
And after that would be just normal registry windows extension or protocol associations controlling everything else.