managing "open with" on the Mac
the journal of Michael Werneburg
twenty-seven years and one million words
Tokyo, 2010.08.08
It's crazy, but in the Mac's OSX there's no way of reliably managing file associations with the applications that open those files.
It's just bizarre, and because the problem seems to be with a "services" management facility rather than the lousy Finder file manager, replacing Finder doesn't fix the problem. And that's just weird—even primitive open source operating systems like PC-BSD do this properly. I did a bit of digging around and found a freeware widget that does the job. It's called RCDefaultApp.
The tool's website says:
RCDefaultApp is a Mac OS X 10.2 or higher preference pane that allows a user to set the default application used for various URL schemes, file extensions, file types, MIME types, and Uniform Type Identifiers (or UTIs; MacOS 10.4 only). MacOS X uses the extension and file type settings to choose the application when opening a file in Finder, while Safari and other applications use the URL and MIME type settings at other times for content not related to a file (such as an unknown URL protocol, or a media stream).