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Open With looks for entries in the Windows registry, under the key HKEY_KEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Clients\StartMenuInternet. It also looks for the presence of Microsoft Edge (Windows 10) in C:\Windows\SystemApps\Microsoft.MicrosoftEdge_8wekyb3d8bbwe (or if C:\Windows isn't your Windows directory, the corresponding place in your Windows directory).
Open With looks for .app files in your local applications directory. The browsers it looks for are: Camino, Google Chrome, Chromium, Firefox, Flock, Opera, Safari, and SeaMonkey.
Open With looks for google-chrome.desktop, chromium-browser.desktop, firefox.desktop, opera.desktop, and seamonkey.desktop in these locations: ~/.local/share/applications, /usr/local/share/applications/, and /usr/share/applications/.
This is quite straight-forward. Click the Add button in the Open With options. On Windows, you're looking for a .exe or a .bat. On OS X it's a .app. On Linux, you want a .desktop or an executable.
You can duplicate an existing browser entry by clicking on it, and then clicking Duplicate.
If you add %s to the arguments for a browser, it will be replaced by the URL you're opening.
There are a lot of command-line arguments for Chromium/Chrome. You might want to add --incognito or, if you want to debug Chrome using the Firefox developer tools, add --remote-debugging-port=9222.
It's a little complicated to run more than one Firefox at once. You'll need separate profiles, and you'll want to add -P {other profile name} or --profile {location}, as well as --no-remote to the arguments. Even then all your problems aren't solved, but it is a start. Hopefully this situation will improve.
I often get asked how to make Explorer open links in a new tab instead of a new window. I don't know. IE seems to do as it pleases.
(You can change almost all of these using the Open With options tab. Do that instead.)
Firstly, some context. Each browser entry has a "key name" used for settings in about:config. For auto-detected browsers, the key name is auto. followed by the name of the file detected (firefox.exe in Windows, firefox in OS X, firefox.desktop in Linux). Edge is a special flower and has the key name auto.msedge. Manually added entries have a 8-character generated key name prefixed by manual., for example manual.zvsOKR6Y. You'll see the manual entries in about:config already. Some manual entries might not have a generated key name if you had an older version of Open With.
To set extra properties on a browser entry, add pref entries named extensions.openwith.{key name}.{pref}. Valid prefs are:
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icon(string) The icon for the entry as a URL, usually afile://URL. -
keyinfo(string) The keyboard shortcut. Open With is fussy about the format. Use the options tab instead. -
name(string) Name to display for the entry. -
hidden(boolean, for automatic entries only) Whether this entry is hidden, obviously. -
usefilepath(boolean, for manual entries only) If the URL to be opened is afile://URL, pass the path to the file instead of a URL. Only really useful if you're trying to do something quite unusual.
If you hold Ctrl while you click on a browser's icon, Open With will not pass the current page's URL to the new browser, and your home page in that browser will open. Obviously this doesn't work when using a keyboard shortcut.