You are missing a convenience of a desktop environment ;-) JK, i3 user here as well. The logic of xdg-open is straightforward. But once it's invoked from with

You are missing a convenience of a desktop environment ;-) JK, i3 user here as well. The logic of xdg-open is straightforward. But once it's invoked from within a major DE, its behavior is sometimes not so obvious as it tries to delegate to a bunch of other tools.