Since a couple of updates, xdg-open doesn’t seem to work properly anymore. Or people could argue it works (too well?). Let me explain, before when I was clicking a hyperlink from an application, it would always open it in the web browser, but since a couple of updates at least, it now open the link in other programs depending on what it detects the target of the link to be. Quick example:

xdg-open https://imgur.com/7t27GZu will open the web browser

xdg-open https://i.imgur.com/7t27GZu.jpg will open the image in Gwenview

I’m pretty confident this was not the behavior let say a month ago (or maybe a little more, I noticed it recently).

Can people confirm that it is not normal behavior and that it also does the same on their side?
I had other weird behavior like links trying to open in Kate, the same as it tries to open links in Gwenview, depending on what xdg-open thinks is appropriate (can’t find the links that produced that anymore, this was when I tried to troubleshoot it when It occurred for the first time at least a month ago, didn’t even have made the connection with xdg-open back then).

Yes this isn’t the normal behavior. For me both the links open in default web browser only. You can refer to this reddit post for a similar issue and arch wiki . This should fix the issue and open the both the links in the given browser:

xdg-settings set default-web-browser chromium.desktop
xdg-mime default chromium.desktop x-scheme-handler/https x-scheme-handler/http
Change chromium to anything else you want