Chrome not opening relevant app from link

I have an LG V30+ running Oreo.

When in Chrome I click on a link to, say, Facebook, YouTube, NYT etc. the link opens another tab within Chrome instead of launcing the installed app. I have also installed Firefox and tried using that with no success.

I have the app settiings to Always Open from their respective links.

I have tried a 3rd part app [Open Link with] and even that says that there are no suitable apps installed. I have launched the relevant app and tried again with the app open and still no joy.

This leads me to believe that there is something actively blocking apps from launching from a link.

Any ideas?

Welcome to Android Central! What happens if you go to Settings>Apps, select Chrome, then Defaults, and the Clear Defaults?

"Always Open" doesn't mean always open the app, it means always open the URL - which is another website if it starts with http or https. So far there's no header for Facebook but if you had, say, an FTP app, and the link was ftp://mysite, tapping it would open your FTP app. (If you have an IRC app, which is the only recent change to the protocol of which I'm aware, and you tapped a link irc://freenode, it would open your IRC app.) Anything else you're likely to see a link to is either http:// or https://, and the app for that is a web browser.