I’m working on a simple mobile app using Cordova/Phonegap. The app contains a hyperlink to a web page. Although this sounds extremely trivial, it took me a couple of hours to get this to work.

For cli-5.2.0 version of PhoneGap, the solution is simple. Create a hyperlink triggering following javascript. Notice the _system target.

window.open("https://wikipedia.org", "_system");

The caveat: you have to adapt the Cordova whitelist to get this to work, see whitelist documentation. Hereafter you find the extract from my config.xml. Obviously you can tweak the intents to your use cases.

<access origin="*"/>
<plugin name="cordova-plugin-whitelist"/>
<allow-intent href="http://*/*"/>
<allow-intent href="https://*/*"/>
<allow-intent href="tel:*"/>
<allow-intent href="sms:*"/>
<allow-intent href="mailto:*"/>
<allow-intent href="geo:*"/>
<platform name="android">
  <allow-intent href="market:*"/>
</platform>
<platform name="ios">
  <allow-intent href="itms:*"/>
  <allow-intent href="itms-apps:*"/>
</platform>

Back in the days, you needed the InAppBrowser plugin for the _system target. For current versions, this is not needed.