webbrowser.py triggers unwanted XQuartz startup

[hans-meine]

BPO	43111
Nosy	@terryjreedy, @ronaldoussoren, @ned-deily
PRs	gh-87277: Don't look for X11 browsers on macOS (webbrowser) #24480

^{Note: these values reflect the state of the issue at the time it was migrated and might not reflect the current state.}

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GitHub fields:

assignee = None
closed_at = None
created_at = <Date 2021-02-03.09:21:34.337>
labels = ['OS-mac', '3.8', '3.9', '3.10', 'performance', 'library']
title = 'webbrowser.py triggers unwanted XQuartz startup'
updated_at = <Date 2021-02-08.09:04:26.632>
user = 'https://bugs.python.org/hans-meine'

bugs.python.org fields:

activity = <Date 2021-02-08.09:04:26.632>
actor = 'terry.reedy'
assignee = 'none'
closed = False
closed_date = None
closer = None
components = ['Library (Lib)', 'macOS']
creation = <Date 2021-02-03.09:21:34.337>
creator = 'hans-meine'
dependencies = []
files = []
hgrepos = []
issue_num = 43111
keywords = ['patch']
message_count = 6.0
messages = ['386182', '386553', '386555', '386557', '386623', '386625']
nosy_count = 4.0
nosy_names = ['terry.reedy', 'ronaldoussoren', 'ned.deily', 'hans-meine']
pr_nums = ['24480']
priority = 'normal'
resolution = None
stage = 'patch review'
status = 'open'
superseder = None
type = 'resource usage'
url = 'https://bugs.python.org/issue43111'
versions = ['Python 3.8', 'Python 3.9', 'Python 3.10']

[hans-meine]

For a long time, I wondered why opening Jupyter notebooks through nbopen always led to XQuartz starting. Now, I found the reason: nbopen uses webbrowser.py to open a web page, and webbrowser.py sees the DISPLAY variable being set and calls xdg-settings (which I installed via the xdg-utils port / MacPorts).

Apparently, in order to be able to fire up XQuartz on demand and to allow people starting X11 applications, DISPLAY is set to a string like /private/tmp/com.apple.launchd.<somecode>/org.xquartz:0.

I am using Safari and find this starting of XQuartz undesirable (causes a delay, uses system resources, leads to a new running program in the Dock / task switcher). On the other hand I can totally understand that the code makes sense.

As a workaround, I can unset DISPLAY, or uninstall xdg-utils (although it is useful, and may be a dependency of other ports), but I thought I should also bring it up here for discussion.

[terryjreedy]

3.7 is a few years old and only gets security fixes. Can you either test on current releases or whether code is still same?

[ronaldoussoren]

The same code is present in trunk.

I'm in favour of disabling usage of X11 browsers of macOS, that's almost certainly not what users want.

I no longer have XQuartz installed on my machine, but when I did I only used it for running X11 GUIs on remote Linux systems.

What I'm not entirely sure about: is this something we should back port or just apply to the trunk (3.10)? This is a behaviour change and as such I'd be inclined to only apply to trunk.

[hans-meine]

I was trying to be very honest, because I am still running 3.7 for production. However, I have carefully checked and the webbrowser.py has only seen (clearly) unrelated changes.

[ronaldoussoren]

I've created a PR for this.

Open question: Is this a bug fix (with back ports to 3.9 and 3.8) or a feature (no back ports)?

[terryjreedy]

webbrowser is 'generous' at to what browsers it will open, some of which are not what hardly anyone would want. So I would call this an 'enhancement' (really 'disenchantment', like all removals;-) unless there were a technical reason other than those given for the exclusion.

[iritkatriel]

I've updated the version labels. The code change has not been applied to main yet (but I don't know whether it is still needed).

[ronaldoussoren]

I'm reviving the PR and will treat this as a new feature, that is I won't perform a back port of the PR. Primary reason for that is that using XQuartz in first place is a niche use case.

[ronaldoussoren]

I've merged a fix for this in the main branch.

I'm not backporting this because X11 usage on macOS should be extremely niche these days, but am willing to reconsider.