Comment 3 for bug 367874

GTK+ doesn't necessarily have a hard dependency on GVFS except on GNOME. In theory, gtk_show_uri should work on all desktop environments since it uses an interface to open an desktop specific URI handler. Unfortunately, GTK+ only contains an implementation for GNOME using GVFS. xdg-open is similar in that it also depends on the desktop environment URI handler executable (gnome-open, etc.). I will probably end up removing gtk_show_uri from the code as I'm quite disappointed GTK+ didn't implement it for non-GNOME systems.