Make desktop links open in the default browser

Problem

Some background information: our desktop application is built using a technology called Electron.js, and in a nutshell it works by creating a sandboxed browser and uses the Chromium javascript engine to render your application in the browser window.

So when you click on links in the desktop app, it displays the webpage inside the sandboxed browser (from the users perspective, inside our application!). We don’t want to do this, and instead, we should open links in a new tab in the default browser.

Marking this as critical because it allows us to land in situations where the only way to return to the app is to kill the application and restart it.

Solution

Make the React-Native <Anchor> component open a new tab by default in:

• The current browser if the platform is web
• The system default browser if the platform is desktop

[jboniface]

This appears to be working already

[stitesExpensify]

This is now fixed again