On a Gnome 2.6 system, xemacs should be opening URLs with the default
Gnome browser, which is (now) accessed via the "gnome-open" program.
The bad behavior I'm seeing is that I had
browse-url-browser-function set to browse-url-gnome-moz,
and my URLs were getting loaded in "mozilla" despite my default
browser being set to "firefox".
It seems to work ok if you use "htmlview" instead of "gnome-open",
but I don't know how portable that is, or whether htmlview is considered
to be deprecated... I've been told that "gnome-open" is the party line
way to do this now.
So:
  - currently, browse-url-gnome-moz uses the program "gnome-moz-remote"
  - "gnome-moz-remote" is how you open URLs in Gnome 1.4
  - "gnome-url-show" is how you open URLs in Gnome 2.2
  - "gnome-open" is how you open URLs in Gnome 2.4 and 2.6
  - "gnome-open" does not take a "--newwin" argument (that behavior
is
    a global Gnome preference, somewhere)
  - on my FC3 (Gnome 2.6) system, "gnome-moz-remote" launches
"mozilla"
    instead of "firefox", even though firefox is set as my default 
    browser in Gnome.  "gnome-open" does the right thing.
  - (setq browse-url-gnome-moz-program "gnome-open") doesn't work
    because of the --newwin thing.  (I guess setting 
    browse-url-new-window-flag to nil might fix that.)
Now here's the fucked up part:
  - (setq browse-url-generic-program "gnome-moz") doesn't work
    for mysterious reasons.  Particularly,
        (start-process "blah" nil "gnome-open"
"http://www.google.com/")
    does not cause a window to appear, but
        (start-process "blah" nil "/tmp/foo"
"http://www.google.com/")
    does, where /tmp/foo is
        #!/bin/sh
        /usr/bin/gnome-open "$@"
        sleep 1
    so I don't know if this is an xemacs problem or a gnome-open
    problem, but somehow it's dying prematurely when launched in
    the way that start-process launches it.
    
  - (shell-command-on-region 1 1 "gnome-open 
http://www.google.com/")
    works fine, however.
-- 
Jamie Zawinski      jwz(a)jwz.org                  
http://www.jwz.org/
                    jwz(a)dnalounge.com      
http://www.dnalounge.com/
                                         http://jwz.livejournal.com/