There is a slew of bugs: #520843, #612306, #906136, #920451, #301677, #281852, #445444 that more or less have one thing in common: they could benefit from inclusion of XDG file association mechanisms.
The current situation is sometimes counterintuitive: sensible-browser and other utils are used in default Debian configurations of many appications, (see i.e. #929456), but the desktop-way of configuring things like default browsers is through XDG association spec. User sets default browser via some fancy DE-provided tool, or by issuing 'xdg-mime default firefox.desktop x-scheme-handler/http x-scheme-handler/https x-scheme-handler/ftp' (which today should be the same backend if setup is done right). But then finds out that some applications stubbornly open a browser that was set at system level by update-alternatives magic. GUI-related sensible utils should use XDG tools as a first priority. Or even better solution: drop GUI-related sensible-utils entirely, in order to avoid constructing a mechanism that tries to rigidly, ineffectively and counterintuitively do the same thing as XDG associations.
