ipython/ipython — pull request #936 by fperez (2011-10-28 00:56:33+00:00)
Title: Start webbrowser in a thread.  Prevents lockup with Chrome.

If a user has Chrome set as their default browser (system-wide or via
the `BROWSER` environment variable), opening the notebook hangs
because the chrome call doesn't return immediately. This solves the
issue by opening the browser in a thread.

Note that there remains an issue where killing the notebook will kill
Chrome if the Chrome session was started by us. I haven't found a way
to work around that despite attempts by making the webbrowser.open()
call in a subprocess.