I disagree on this one. This is not about standard python behaviour but about what this application behaves like. And I think it should be consistent whether you happen to have it installed on python3 or python2. It should always return text data (`unicode`) and not `bytes`, since it deals with *text* documents.
Furthermore, from a developers standpoint, I'll strongly advice you not to support multiple behaviours on different python versions in any of your applications, it will make your (or your users) head ache sooner or later. The python3 behaviour with unicode is much more reasonable and I think it's a real shame they ever thought `str is bytes` is a good idea.

If you don't think like this, I can't prevent you from changing it upstream, but I will not write my name below that commit ;)