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Several good points, Mike! (And I wondered where your 
own open program would fit in here.) The major problem 
with webbrowser is that it either uses obsolete techniques 
or just leaves most of the work to the caller. Moreover, it 
has to keep pace with the range of applicable programs, 
which is more work than just keeping up with relevant 
desktop environments even for such a restricted domain. 
   
Mike, John: the motivation for this module was that 
os.startfile hooks into the Windows API in order to follow 
the user preferences reliably stored elsewhere, yet there 
aren't equivalent functions for other systems, despite the 
fact that such functions have been around for some time. I 
think "kfmclient exec" may be the way to go for KDE, by the 
way. 
 
As for Windows, I do recall entering URLs at the command 
line, but I don't recall whether Windows observed my 
desktop preferences, although I do seem to remember it 
launching Acrobat Reader for remote PDF resources. 
Someone else would have to verify that, though.