Open with "do this automatically" doesnt remember

[robert h]

AH, more data. Now after clean reinstall, if i go to Download Options in FF, i can see the .torrent extension, so i choose to have them open with uTorrent and it accepts it , but after saying open the windows says Torrent... Open with... (then has the utorrent logo) and "none selected"

Big time problem.

[jles]

hey-I think this is still a bug in 2006. Am I right or wrong? Thanks.

[Guest]

As far as I know... this thread seems to have died.

[trodas]

Yes, thread died. But tehre is a simple solution that worked well for me - use OLD FireFox (in my case 1.0.6) and ALL is working as it should. FF properly remember the choice "do not ask again" and that it is.

I wonder why you guys insist on more recent FF, when it is, in fact, not very usable.

It seems to be a known bug, but no-one is willing to do anything with it...:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=354400

Movie example of the problem:
WMV sample: http://ax2.old-cans.com/Voting_Machine.wmv

(yes, working for me w/o asking all over again in FireFox 1.0.6)

[Alice]

That WMV example falls under the category of text/plain files being interpreted as or "likely to be" another MIME type. Explanation here:
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Opening_files ... web_server

Sometimes a misconfigured web server will send a file with an inappropriate MIME type and, instead of the file automatically opening with the browser plugin, an "Opening" dialog box will appear, asking you to either save the file or open it with a chosen external application. This may happen with .wmv (Windows Media Video) files sent as "text/plain" instead of the correct "video/x-ms-wmv" MIME type (see bug 250914, probably related to the fix for bug 220807, outlined here).

You can see that more easily in SeaMonkey, which actually tells you that the file is "likely to be" of type "video/x-ms-wmv". SeaMonkey does the right thing by disabling the option to set a download action:


I entered the Voting_Machine.wmv example link in Rex Swain's HTTP Viewer:
http://www.rexswain.com/httpview.html and this is what information is shown about the file:

Receiving Header:
HTTP/1.1·200·OK(CR)(LF)
Date:·Mon,·05·Feb·2007·18:41:40·GMT(CR)(LF)
Server:·Apache(CR)(LF)
Last-Modified:·Fri,·23·Sep·2005·14:58:34·GMT(CR)(LF)
ETag:·"1d727b-40171a4c2ba80"(CR)(LF)
Accept-Ranges:·bytes(CR)(LF)
Content-Length:·1929851(CR)(LF)
Connection:·close(CR)(LF)
Content-Type:·text/plain(CR)(LF)
(CR)(LF)

[old FatJohn]

Obviously using 1.0.6 isn't such a wonderful idea from a security viewpoint.... <a href="http://www.mozilla.org/projects/security/known-vulnerabilities.html#Firefox">Mozilla Firefox Vulnerabilities</a>

Since the file is text/plain, it should be displayed onscreen. And that's a bug!

[Alice]

You want to go back to displaying wmv files as gibberish!?

Sometimes a misconfigured web server will send a file with an inappropriate MIME type and, instead of the file automatically opening with the browser plugin, an "Opening" dialog box will appear, asking you to either save the file or open it with a chosen external application. This may happen with .wmv (Windows Media Video) files sent as "text/plain" instead of the correct "video/x-ms-wmv" MIME type (see bug 250914, probably related to the fix for bug 220807, outlined here).

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=250914
Clicking on WMV file opens What should Firefox do? dialog

Comment #4 [reply] Matthias Versen (matti) 2005-11-02 06:14:38 PST

The website sends the wmv file with a wrong mime-Type (text/plain) and Firefox
would display the file as text (!) but we added a workaround that firefox
displays the File save as dialog instead.

It's a bug that the "Do this automatically..." is not greyed but not the other
things.
We have a bug for duping but I can't find it at the moment.

[old FatJohn]

Hehe, I did read the bugs. Was just trying to be real funny because this all is so silly since it only happens with misconfigured webservers. They should either be configured or treated with some C4 alongside their operators...

Unfortunately, there's a bunch out there. So maybe Firefox should deal with it somehow, preferably with some kicking and screaming.

[trodas]

FatJohn, that is BS. It is a known bug and it is not fixed, that it is. Everyone talking about MIME errors or misconfigured servers are just plainly wrong. FireFox does save the mime types and does edentify them well from v1.0 preview to v2.x. What is a problem, tough, is, that from 1.5.x it does NOT REMEMBER THE USER SELECTION DO NOT ASK AGAIN about this file type.
MIME is perfectly fine and has nothing to do about it.

1.0.8 working flawlessly


PS. with the same filetypes, Opera 9 working flawlessly too, M$ IE keep asking about mpegs, tough...

[old FatJohn]

I wonder what does 1.0.8 do then? Assign a general mime type to a program? Assign a extension to a program? Both are incorrect behaviour. The misconfigured servers are the problem here. No BS there.

[Alice]

It is a known bug and it is not fixed,

In bug 354400 the original reporter gave a Bit Torrent download action example. Included in Comment #4 was a link to a "LiveHeaders snapshot": https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/attachment.cgi?id=240234 which shows the content-disposition as "attachment". That seems to be related to a different bug, reported on page 1 of this thread:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=236541
"do this automatically for files like this" doesn't work when Content-Disposition:attachment is used (fixed 1.8.1)

Comment #22 Jeff Evans 2005-02-21 22:14:13 PST

I believe this bug has to do with servers that send Content-Disposition
headers.
I see this problem with bittorrent sites. On some, the torrent is
automatically downloaded and launched in Azuereus, my configured handler for
torrent files. On other sites, I get the "What do you want to do with this
file" dialog box. I wrote a simple script which helped me reproduce it:

<?PHP
$filename = "test.torrent";
$fn = $filename;
header("Content-Length: " . filesize($fn));
header("Content-Transfer-Encoding: binary");
//header("Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="" . $filename . "";");
header("Content-Type: application/x-bittorrent");
header("Transfer-Encoding: chunked");

@readfile($fn);
?>

If I uncomment the Content-Disposition header, I receive the dialog prompt.
Otherwise, as is, the file gets downloaded automatically.

Comment #35 [reply] Gavin Sharp 2005-08-22 14:14:53 PST

This bug, as summarized, is invalid, per comment 29 and others. The fix in this
case is to grey out the checkbox when Content-Disposition: attachment is used,
and that's bug 285976.

Comment #38 [reply] Boris Zbarsky 2005-08-23 21:17:26 PST

So there are two issues here.

1) UI bug. If the "do this automatically" checkbox setting for a file will
just be ignored, then it should be disabled or not even present. Seamonkey gets
this right, for example. This seems to be covered by bug 285976.

2) Correct general behavior. The key is that for
content-disposition:attachment silent handling of data by the browser, a plugin,
or a helper application is not acceptable. The former two cases are handled by
not even trying to handle that way. The last case is handled by forcing the
helper app dialog to come up even if the "don't show the dialog" preference is set.

If the "do this automatically" checkbox is still available where the content-disposition is attachment then the "fix" for bug 354400 should also be to have the checkbox "greyed-out".

[trodas]

FatJohn - well, v1.0.8 (including all previous versions) define the file correctly in their MIME prefs, witch is why it worked for me in FF 1.5 when I just upgraded the FF to higher version w/o cleaning the prefs... All later versions are flawed and in case of some files keep asking, asking and asking again like they are stupid.
BS is there and that is the way you want to shift the blame from FF to "misconfigured servers", but anyone with even a fraction of working mind see, that if v1.0.8 working correctly as well, as other browsers, the flaw is not in the server, but in the FireFox. Hence what you saying about "incorrect behaviour" or "misconfigured servers" are pure and simple BS. Period.

BTW, the point is, that even if this is actually "incorrect behaviour", it has to be done this way because all servers in the world are then, according to ya, "misconfigured" and since we, users, want use things and not fight with bugs and configurations, we simply want to be done it even in the "incorrect way" if this is the only way that it could be done.
Period.


Alice - I think you forget to read there the comments claiming that the bug was re-introduced and hence it is not fixed, right? And all my experineces showing up pretty well, that I can't use any higher FF that 1.0.8 - so be it. Higher versions are flawed, useless for me, so...
Bug https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=236541 seems to be interesting, but clearly related are bugs:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=250914 - Clicking on WMV file opens What should Firefox do? dialog
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=354400 - Open file dialogue weirdness

[old FatJohn]

No. You don't understand it at all. A browser doesn't define mime types! The server does.

There are a lot of things that work but are still wrong and flawed. E.g. how interweb exploter reads the webpages. Most newbie 'webmasters' perceive IE working correctly when it reads their pages as they want but in fact, it's doing the wrong thing. This is an analogy. You can be as theatrical about it as you want. And you obviously want a lot.

Not all the servers are misconfigured, just a bunch of them. They live in the Microsoft internet. It's people like you who make monopolies like Microsoft possible. Very sad.

Before arguing and calling people names, you should at least grasp the issue at hand.

[popoyaya]

Update:

As of April 2007 Mozilla have still not sorted out this bug. This is unforgiveable. How many millions of people must continue to be nagged thousands of times by this pointless file dialogue?

I say organize a petition threathening to boycott firefox if this issue is not resolved NOW!

[cchris d]

Update:

As of April 2007 Mozilla have still not sorted out this bug. This is unforgiveable. How many millions of people must continue to be nagged thousands of times by this pointless file dialogue?

I say organize a petition threathening to boycott firefox if this issue is not resolved NOW!

lol

Although I do find this problem annoying.

"When I download a file, and it asks me whether I want to open or save the file and I check "do this automatically every time" I'm just wasting my time. It continues to ask this question."