[issue10799] Improve webbrowser (.open) doc and behavior

[Ezio Melotti]

Ezio Melotti added the comment:

On WinXP, if I try "firefox bugs.python.org", I get an error because it can not find firefox in the PATH.  This is probably what happens with _isexecutable("firefox").
However if I try "C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\>firefox.exe bugs.python.org", Firefox correctly opens the page.

So I think that the problem here is not that the browser fails to open "bugs.python.org" or "google.com", but that the executable of the browser is not found, and whatever is used to open "bugs.python.org" (os.startfile()?) doesn't know that it should be opened with Firefox.

> In the longer run, what I would really like is for webbrowser to be
> better at using the default or finding executables.

I haven't looked at the code, but, if reasonable, it should search in some common folders for the executables of the supported browsers.

Should I create a separate issue for this?  If this solution is not viable, we can always document that the URLs have to start with 'http://' or 'www.'.

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Python tracker <report at bugs.python.org>
<http://bugs.python.org/issue10799>
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