Open your Windows browser from WSL2 without wslview

wsl windows ubuntu browser vscode gh code

The problem

On a fresh WSL2 Ubuntu 26.04 LTS install wslview is gone. Anything that relied on it to pop open your Windows browser (gh auth login, xdg-open, etc.) now fails or prints a URL you have to copy by hand.

The fix turns out to be a one-liner: point the BROWSER environment variable at Windows’ own explorer.exe.

What happened to wslu / wslview?

wslview was part of wslu, a community collection of WSL helper utilities that Ubuntu shipped for years. The project has been discontinued:

  • February 2025: the maintainer announced that development of wslu and its related projects would cease completely, that the wslutiliti.es site would shut down, and that the versions bundled with Ubuntu would no longer be supported by them.
  • March 2025: the wslutilities/wslu repository was archived (read-only). The GitHub organization followed in May 2025. The repo and the announcement discussion now return a 404, which is why you can’t reach them anymore.
  • Ubuntu 26.04 “Resolute”: no wslu package. Launchpad lists it only up to 24.04 Noble, so apt install wslu gives you E: Unable to locate package wslu.

Other projects such as DDEV and the Rust open crate have dropped it as well.

Notice Even on older releases where wslu can still be installed (22.04, 24.04), it’s unmaintained. It’s better to move off it now than to have it break during your next distro upgrade.

The trick: BROWSER=explorer.exe

Most Linux CLI tools that want to open a URL respect the BROWSER environment variable: gh, xdg-open (when no desktop environment is detected, which is the case in WSL), Python’s webbrowser, git web--browse, and many Node.js tools. With WSL interop enabled (the default) you can run Windows executables directly from Linux, and explorer.exe <url> hands the URL to whatever Windows has set as its default browser.



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export BROWSER=/mnt/c/Windows/explorer.exe
# Test opening a URL:
"$BROWSER" 'https://github.com'

Your default Windows browser should open on github.com. Now try the thing that broke:



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gh auth login --web
xdg-open 'https://github.com'
python3 -m webbrowser 'https://github.com'

Caveats

Info explorer.exe returns exit code 1 even when it opened the URL successfully. Some tools see that as a failure and print something like Failed opening a web browser ... exit status 1 even though the browser did open. The wrapper script below hides this.

  • URLs only. explorer.exe doesn’t understand Linux paths like /home/me/report.html. To open a local file, convert the path first: explorer.exe "$(wslpath -w ./report.html)".
  • Quote URLs you type by hand. Your shell treats & and ? as special, so wrap the URL in single quotes: "$BROWSER" 'https://example.com/?a=1&b=2'. Tools like gh pass the URL directly and aren’t affected.
  • Custom /etc/wsl.conf. A changed automount.root moves /mnt/c, and [interop] enabled=false blocks Windows executables entirely.

Making it permanent

Running export in a terminal only lasts for that session. Put it in your shell startup files, but think about which file you use and when you set it.

A wrapper deals with the exit-code quirk and gives every tool a single, stable path to call:



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mkdir -p ~/.local/bin
cat > ~/.local/bin/winbrowser <<'EOF'
#!/bin/sh
# Open URLs in the default Windows browser from WSL.
# explorer.exe exits 1 even on success, so always report success.
/mnt/c/Windows/explorer.exe "$@"
exit 0
EOF
chmod +x ~/.local/bin/winbrowser

zsh

~/.zshrc is only read by interactive shells. If you want scripts, VS Code tasks and other non-interactive zsh processes to see BROWSER too, use ~/.zshenv, which every zsh instance reads:



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# ~/.zshenv
# Only on WSL, only when nothing else (e.g. VS Code) already set BROWSER
if [[ -n "$WSL_DISTRO_NAME" && -z "$BROWSER" && -x "$HOME/.local/bin/winbrowser" ]]; then
  export BROWSER="$HOME/.local/bin/winbrowser"
fi

bash

Ubuntu’s default ~/.bashrc is read by interactive non-login shells, while ~/.profile is read by login shells (and already sources ~/.bashrc and adds ~/.local/bin to PATH). Put it in ~/.profile so it’s set once per login and inherited by every child process:



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# ~/.profile
# Only on WSL, only when nothing else (e.g. VS Code) already set BROWSER
if [ -n "$WSL_DISTRO_NAME" ] && [ -z "$BROWSER" ] && [ -x "$HOME/.local/bin/winbrowser" ]; then
  export BROWSER="$HOME/.local/bin/winbrowser"
fi

If your terminal starts non-login shells only, put the same block in ~/.bashrc as well.

Why the guards?

  • $WSL_DISTRO_NAME: WSL sets this automatically. The check keeps your dotfiles portable, so the same .zshenv or .profile doesn’t break BROWSER when you sync it to a real Linux machine or a Mac.
  • -z "$BROWSER": VS Code’s Remote-WSL integrated terminal exports its own BROWSER helper, which opens URLs on the host side through VS Code. Don’t overwrite it unconditionally. If that helper doesn’t work for you, drop this check and your wrapper will always win.
  • -x: if the wrapper is missing, you don’t end up with a BROWSER that points at nothing.

Clean up leftovers from wslu

If you upgraded from an older Ubuntu release instead of installing fresh, there may still be references to wslview around:



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# Is the (unmaintained) package still installed?
dpkg -l wslu
sudo apt remove wslu

# Does anything still point at wslview?
grep -n wslview ~/.zshrc ~/.zshenv ~/.bashrc ~/.profile 2>/dev/null
update-alternatives --display x-www-browser 2>/dev/null
echo "$BROWSER"

Verify

Open a new shell (exec zsh / exec bash -l) and check that echo "$BROWSER" prints your wrapper.

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