system crash reports not opened with my default browser

When I receive a crash notification for a system crash (one that requires root to read and write to the .crash file) and I choose to report the bug, the bug report is opened with chromium instead of firefox (my default browser). Looking apport/ui.py we see:

        # If we are called through sudo, determine the real user id and run the
        # browser with it to get the user's web browser settings.
        try:
            uid = int(os.getenv('PKEXEC_UID', os.getenv('SUDO_UID')))
            sudo_prefix = ['sudo', '-H', '-u', '#' + str(uid)]
        except TypeError:
            sudo_prefix = []

        try:
            try:
                subprocess.call(sudo_prefix + ['xdg-open', url])
            except OSError as e:
                # fall back to webbrowser
                webbrowser.open(url, new=True, autoraise=True)
                sys.exit(0)

running 'xdg-open "http://www.google.com"' opens google in firefox, however starting a root shell via "sudo -i" and running
'sudo -H -u \#1000 xdg-open "http://www.google.com"' opens google in chromium-browser. Further more, running 'xdg-open "http://www.google.com"' as root presents me with a warning about refusing to start chromium as root so it seems that the xdg-open call is using root's preferred browser and not mine.