In Python, you can do this:
import webbrowser
webbrowser.open_new(https://philwilson.org/blog)and lo! it will open your default browser at that URL whether you are on Windows, Linux or Mac.
I can’t find the same functionality in Ruby anywhere. I notice that even Shoes has its own native C implementation (check out the shoes_browser_open method in each of the platform-specific files in http://github.com/why/shoes/tree/master/shoes/native).
Does this really mean I’ll have to implement my own? Or have I simply missed the bundled one? Google really has not been my friend on this.