Under Gnome, Firefox will open the wrong URL when launched by webbrowser. For example after running the following interactive session: bingham@grizzly:~> python Python 2.5.1 (r251:54863, Jun 6 2007, 13:42:30) [GCC 4.1.2 20061115 (prerelease) (SUSE Linux)] on linux2 Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information. >>> import webbrowser >>> webbrowser.open('http://www.python.org') True Firefox attempts to open the URL file:///home/bingham/%22http://www.python.org%22. This is caused by a bug in the Python standard library's webbrowser module that only affects machines running Gnome. On Gnome, webbrowser runs the command gconftool-2 -g /desktop/gnome/url-handlers/http/command 2>/dev/null to find the web browser, which prints out a browser command line like /pkgs/Firefox/2.0/firefox "%s" The quotes around "%s" are preserved when passing the command-line arguments. The quotes prevent firefox from recognizing the URL and firefox falls back to treating it as a file name. The webbrowser module already handles extra quoting around the URL for the BROWSER environment variable and this same treatment should be applied to the result of gconftool-2. The BROWSER environment variable issue, now fixed, is described at http://bugs.python.org/issue1684254. The present issue was discussed in an Ubuntu bug report (https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/python2.5/+bug/83974) but was not resolved.
I am on Fedora Core 3, gnome 2.6 and I am unable to reproduce this issue. Could this be a Ubuntu configuration bug. Like adding " quotes after %s for the firefox command?
