I export to HTML fairly often with orgmode. In this case “export and open” resulting in viewing the code is almost never what I want; it would be much more useful like the export pdf option, which doesn’t view to the LaTeX code but right to the PDF.

Answer

As per https://emacs.stackexchange.com/questions/2387/browser-not-opening-when-exporting-html-from-org-mode

A setting change fixed this. M-x customize-variable org-file-apps and for files of type \\.x?html?\\' I specified firefox %s. Now it does what I want.