webbrowser.open with file: URLs may launch editor instead of browser

[minrk]

Bug report

Bug description:

In the code:

import webbrowser
from pathlib import Path

index_html = Path.cwd() / "index.html"
webbrowser.open(index_html.as_uri())

It is common for xdg-open (on linux) or open location (on mac) or os.startfile (on windows) to be selected as the default browser. This is great and simple for http[s] urls, but when these are passed file:// urls, all of the above select the default opener for HTML files, which may not be a browser at all (commonly a text editor for developer systems).

I don't know if there's a way to indicate that Browser entries can handle given URL schemes, but when selecting a browser from the try list, ideally these generic 'open' mechanisms should be skipped for file: URLs. Even better, use standard APIs to lookup the default browsers for http[s] and invoke that explicitly, rather than relying on an interpretation of "open URL" which is only valid for http URLs.

I believe URLForApplicationToOpenURL is the current macOS API to look up the application for http:, which could be used to launch explicitly with a browser. I guess xdg-settings get is already the equivalent for most linux situations and preferred if available, which is great. I'm not sure there's a more general way to discover what xdg-open will do with http://, but we have occasional reports where xdg-settings get default-web-browser doesn't work and xdg-open is invoked and doesn't launch a browser (or launches a different browser). I've no idea what the Windows call would be, but this looks like the same question.

This appears to have been opened long ago as #37540 and erroneously closed as an Apple bug (all platforms exhibit this behavior, and I think the bug is pretty clearly in webbrowser's assumption that "open file://path.html" means "open file://path.html with a web browser" which does not appear to be what any of the platforms mean by the chosen API).

CPython versions tested on:

3.9, 3.10, 3.11, 3.12

Operating systems tested on:

Linux, macOS, Windows