'open' is on of the things I long for most as a Linux user.
There are several ways to achieve something that are all inferior or downright broken. Usually you don't have a huge problem, until you have. xdg-open for example could've solved this, if it was universally working.
I wrote related rant once[0] when I tried to debug an issue of a misconfigured default browser.
While xdg-open also works well for me with KDE's default applications, when I used to use Openbox or LXDE, it was much less successful. The breadth of the group of tools that respond correctly to KDE settings as opposed to the less-common environments has been one of the reasons I've been so happy to switch.
I wrote related rant once[0] when I tried to debug an issue of a misconfigured default browser.
[0]: http://f5n.org/blog/2013/default-browser-linux/