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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.

The current code in the 2.5 branch uses shlex.split to postprocess the
command line returned by gconftool too, so this should be already fixed.

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?

Okay. I found the status later. It was fixed then with Python 2.6 which
I am using.