Why does gx call curl when the cursor is on a URL with trailing slash?

Question

When my cursor is on a URL that ends with a trailing slash, for example : http://www.google.com/

... if I type gx to open the link in my browser, curl is also called to download the webpage and the html code is displayed in a new buffer whose name is the URL ("http://www.google.com").

Is there a way to tell vim to only send the URL to the browser and not download the webpage ?

I don't know if it's related but I've set up the values of 2 global variables in my vimrc :

let g:netrw_gx="<cWORD>"
let g:netrw_browsex_viewer="xdg-open"

The first one is to prevent vim from sending only a part of the URL when it contains a ? or #.
The second one is to call a default program on my linux system when the cursor is on the path to a local file (instead of a web URL).

I'm using vim 7.4.899 and here's the output of vim --version.

Answer 1

Try netrw v155d ; it won't treat the url ending with a "/" as a file to be obtained. You can get it from http://www.drchip.org/astronaut/vim/index.html#NETRW .

Answer 2

I have the netrw version from Sep 19, 2016 and still encounter the same issue.

Instead of netrw, I use tyru's plugin to open a URL in the browser.

The plugin works great so far.