So, I opened Bug #297491 but I'm not sure if it really is a bug, considering I only have this problem on my work machine.

Anyone have any ideas?

Which application(s) does this occur with?
KDE will only do this if it believes the applications in question do not support the protocol you are trying to use with them. KDE applications should natively use KIO, and thus support all protocols.

I noted some of this in the bug report, but I'll duplicate it here. Basically, any KDE app that tries to open a url will display this behavior. The most prevalent app that I run in to this with is Akregator, but just doing a

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kde-open http://www.google.com

will show the behavior, so the problem is somewhere in kdelibs, not at the application level.

I currently have firefox set as the default web browser in systemsettings. If I change it to 'in an application based on the contents of the URL,' doing

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kde-open http://www.google.com

will open in Kate (!).

does this happen as a new/different user

Not it does not. Any suggestions on config files to check?

try:

renaming ~/.kde4/share/mimelnk or ~/.kde/share/mimelnk (dependent on distro) will reset file associations to default

run kbuildsycoca4 --noincremental will rebuild the system configuration cache (not sure it's relevant but won't hurt)

The file (directory?) mimelnk does not exist under ~/.kde4/share. It does exist under /opt/kde3/share and /usr/share.

I tried to rebuild the system configuration cache, but that didn't do anything. (I'm not sure if this was meant to be independent of the first suggestion or not, but I did it anyway).

just guessing here:

try renaming ~/.local/share/mime

systemsettings -> file associations -> search -> html -> text -> html -> application preference order -> what are the 1st couple of apps listed