You can set some browser-unrelated program or script as your desktop environment's default browser, for example I wrote a Zsh script that creates a KDE dialog and asks me to copy the URL to the clipboard.
I'm not currently at my PC, but if you want it I can paste it in a comment here when I get to it - it shouldn't be too hard to translate it to Bash, either.
Other than that? /usr/bin/true is a pretty nice default browser for applications to start without your consent, very minimal and lightweight.
#!/usr/bin/zsh
nl=$'\n'
dnl=$'\n\n'
url=$1
msgcontent=$url; shift
argi=1
for arg ($@); do
argi=$(($argi + 1))
msgcontent=${msgcontent}${nl}Argument\ ${argi}': '${arg}
done
title="${0:A}"
msg="An application attempted to open a web page:${dnl}\"${msgcontent}\"${dnl}Copy the URL to clipboard?"
kdialog --title $title --yesno $msg
answer=$?
if [[ $answer = 0 ]]; then wl-copy $url; fi
If you want to translate it to Bash, keep in mind that arrays behave differently between the two shells, and syntax like for arg ($@); do would likely misbehave or not work at all.
Also, there's an issue where some applications do something weird, and the URL seems to be a zero-length argument. I have absolutely no idea what's up with that.