webbrowser module's Firefox support

[Georg Brandl]

Dustan wrote:
> MonkeeSage wrote:
>> Dustan wrote:
>> > I did do a search here, but came up empty-handed. Can anyone tell me
>> > how to get the webbrowser module to recognize firefox's existence,
>> > given this information?
>>
>> Looks like it is checking %PATH% for firefox.exe. Try:
>>
>> >>> import os
>> >>> os.environ["PATH"] = r"C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox;"
>> >>> import webbrowser
>> >>> webbrowser._browsers
>>
>> Regards,
>> Jordan
> 
> Thanks! But I'm still getting an error message:
> 
>>>> import webbrowser
>>>> webbrowser._browsers
> {'windows-default': [<class 'webbrowser.WindowsDefault'>, None],
> 'firefox': [None, <webbrowser.BackgroundBrowser object at 0x00BAC8D0>]}
>>>> cont=webbrowser._browsers['firefox'][1]
>>>> cont
> <webbrowser.BackgroundBrowser object at 0x00BAC8D0>
>>>> cont.open("http://www.google.com")
> 
> Traceback (most recent call last):
>   File "<pyshell#10>", line 1, in <module>
>     cont.open("http://www.google.com")
>   File "C:\Python25\lib\webbrowser.py", line 185, in open
>     p = subprocess.Popen(cmdline, close_fds=True, preexec_fn=setsid)
>   File "C:\Python25\lib\subprocess.py", line 551, in __init__
>     raise ValueError("close_fds is not supported on Windows "
> ValueError: close_fds is not supported on Windows platforms
> 
> Looking in the docs on subprocess.Popopen
> (http://docs.python.org/lib/node529.html), it says "If close_fds is
> true, all file descriptors except 0, 1 and 2 will be closed before the
> child process is executed. (Unix only)". I have to be frank; I have no
> idea what this means. What should I do to fix this?

This is a bug, and has now been fixed in SVN. As a workaround, you can
edit the webbrowser.py file and remove the close_fds and preexec_fn arguments
to Popen.

Georg