I typically use Chrome for everything so my daily Chrome is larded with tons of extensions that may not play well with developing web applications. One example is they often litter the console log with various log messages of their own, or error messages with permissions problems and things like that
So I like to develop web apps in a clean vanilla copy of Chrome Canary or Chrome Beta.
Because of how create-react-app works, it seems as if there is no clear, or easy way to specify the use of a different browser in package.json
Digging into the scripts, it seems you can specify the browser you prefer by setting the BROWSER environment variable in the command line yarn start, that environment variable can be an absolute path or just the application name itself.
So here's how to do that when using WSL2 on Windows 10 and wanting to bring up Windows Chrome Beta pointing at your web app running in WSL2
| browser | command line |
|---|---|
| Chrome Beta | env BROWSER="/mnt/c/Program Files/Google/Chrome Beta/Application/chrome.exe" yarn start |
| msedge | env BROWSER='msedge' yarn start |
| beta | env BROWSER='beta' yarn start |
| brave | env BROWSER='brave' yarn start |
| firefox | env BROWSER='firefox' yarn start |
See also the official docs here: https://create-react-app.dev/docs/advanced-configuration for more ways to configure webpack through environmental variables