bash - Clean way to launch the web browser from shell script?

Question

In a bash script, I need to launch the user web browser. There seems to be many ways of doing this:

• $BROWSER
• xdg-open
• gnome-open on GNOME
• www-browser
• x-www-browser
• ...

Is there a more-standard-than-the-others way to do this that would work on most platforms, or should I just go with something like this:

#/usr/bin/env bash

if [ -n $BROWSER ]; then
  $BROWSER 'http://wwww.google.com'
elif which xdg-open > /dev/null; then
  xdg-open 'http://wwww.google.com'
elif which gnome-open > /dev/null; then
  gnome-open 'http://wwww.google.com'
# elif bla bla bla...
else
  echo "Could not detect the web browser to use."
fi

Answer 1

python -mwebbrowser http://example.com

works on many platforms