Under Gnome, Firefox will open the wrong URL when launched bywebbrowser.  For example after running the following interactive session:bingham@grizzly:~> pythonPython 2.5.1 (r251:54863, Jun  6 2007, 13:42:30)[GCC 4.1.2 20061115 (prerelease) (SUSE Linux)] on linux2Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.>>> import webbrowser>>> webbrowser.open('http://www.python.org')TrueFirefox attempts to open the URLfile:///home/bingham/%22http://www.python.org%22.This is caused by a bug in the Python standard library's webbrowsermodule that only affects machines running Gnome.On Gnome, webbrowser runs the commandgconftool-2 -g /desktop/gnome/url-handlers/http/command 2>/dev/nullto 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-linearguments. The quotes prevent firefox from recognizing the URL andfirefox falls back to treating it as a file name. The webbrowser modulealready handles extra quoting around the URL for the BROWSER environmentvariable and this same treatment should be applied to the result ofgconftool-2.The BROWSER environment variable issue, now fixed, is described athttp://bugs.python.org/issue1684254.  The present issue was discussed inan Ubuntu bug report(https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/python2.5/+bug/83974) but wasnot resolved.

The current code in the 2.5 branch uses shlex.split to postprocess thecommand 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 %sfor the firefox command?

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