To be honest, I'm not really sure that I know the difference between 'chrome' and 'google-chrome', but apparently there is some since they've made the two different type names in the webbrowser documentation. The proper way to do this is: import webbrowser as wb However, what if you want to to open in Google Chrome? The above should work for the computer's default browser. As the instructions state, using the open() function does work, and opens the default web browser - usually I would say: 'why wouldn't I want to use Firefox?!' (my default and favorite browser) import webbrowser as wb