In my experience xhtml-mode's browse-url-of-buffer command uses different browsers depending, I guess, on the different desktop environments (or on their absence sometimes).
My question, how can I tell Emacs to use always the same browser, desktop environment notwithstanding?
Bonus points :-) for the details of the Emacs-environment interaction that leads to browse-url-of-buffer calling a specific browser...
tia
Take a look at browse-url-browser-function; you can use it to specify various functions, including browse-url-firefox, browse-url-chromium, browse-url-w3 & many more — you can even write your own, if you feel like it.
You can find this sort of thing out for yourself by running e.g. C-h f browse-url-of-buffer, and then clicking on the browse-url.el link, which will take you to the definition of browse-url-browser-function; you can see at the end that it calls (browse-url-of-file file-name); if you type M-. on browse-url-of-file you'll be taken to its definition and see from its docstring that it calls browse-url; its docstring discusses browse-url-browser-function and more.
You can also do C-h a browse-url to see stuff apropos to browsing URLs; there's a ton of stuff there.
