On Unix, if you have galeon installed and no BROWSER
environment variable, webbrowser.open('http://...')
will hang if there is no galeon running at the time of
the call.

The problem is, webbrowser.open calls "galeon <the
URL>".  If a galeon instance is running, the new
invocation will signal the old about the URL and then
exit.  If there is no galeon instance running, the new
instance will do the job itself and not exit, so the
call to webbrowser.open() will hang until you exit galeon.

Skip had this to say:

In the meantime, it looks like if you modify the
definition of cmd in
Galeon._remote to 

        cmd = "%s %s %s & >/dev/null 2>&1" %
(self.name, raise_opt, action)

that webbrowser.open() should return for you.  I'm not
sure the '&' is sufficient though.  You may lose the
Galeon instance if you then exit from the Python
interpreter.  In general, the code in
webbrowser._remote() looks a bit hackish.  I'm not sure
I like this:

        rc = os.system(cmd)
        if rc:
            import time
            os.system("%s >/dev/null 2>&1 &" % self.name)
            time.sleep(PROCESS_CREATION_DELAY)
            rc = os.system(cmd)

Oh well, it's what we're stuck with...

Logged In: YES 
user_id=33168

webbrowser was pretty much re-written, so I'm assuming this
is at least out of date, and hopefully fixed.