1109420 - PDF Preview in Firefox not honored for specific URL

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Firefox :: Untriaged, defect)

Description

[Christopher M. Penalver]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:34.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/34.0
Build ID: 20141127111021

Steps to reproduce:

1) lsb_release -rd
Description: Ubuntu 14.04.1 LTS
Release: 14.04

2) apt-cache policy firefox
firefox:
  Installed: 34.0+build2-0ubuntu0.14.04.1
  Candidate: 34.0+build2-0ubuntu0.14.04.1
  Version table:
 *** 34.0+build2-0ubuntu0.14.04.1 0
        500 http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ trusty-updates/main amd64 Packages
        500 http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ trusty-security/main amd64 Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status
     28.0+build2-0ubuntu2 0
        500 http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ trusty/main amd64 Packages

3) What is expected to happen is when then preference in Firefox is set for PDF to Preview in Firefox, it does.

4) What happens instead is it doesn't for the following specific URL:
http://marcus.granado.googlepages.com/benny2008-Lodamin-NEWS.pdf

Firefox asks if I want to download it and open it with ghex.

However, the preference is honored if one goes to:
http://insights.ubuntu.com/wp-content/uploads/14.04_Server_brochure_screen_final.pdf?utm_source=What%E2%80%99s%20new%20in%20Ubuntu%20Server%2014.04%20LTS?&utm_medium=download+link&utm_content=


Actual results:

^


Expected results:

^

Comment 1

[Loic]

Are you sure this website allows the user to open directly the PDF?

Comment 2

[Christopher M. Penalver]

Loic, thank you for your comment. I don't have enough knowledge one way or the other to comment to that. However, since a direct link has been provided, have you reviewed if this website allows the user to open PDFs directly (if that even applies here)?

Comment 3

[Loic]

On my side, I am forced to download it locally, I can't open it online (surely because the website wants to save ressources).

Comment 4

[Christopher M. Penalver]

Loic, thank you for your comment. Reviewing the official Mozilla documentation regarding this issue, it doesn't mention anything about how some websites force downloading a PDF file, which preempts the users choice regarding PDFs. Hence, would this article want to be updated with the information you advised to?

As well, would you be able to detail what server side would force this (ex. I looked at the source of the page and noticed code xyz that infers/proves this)?

Comment 5

[Matthias Versen [:Matti]]

The URL is served as application/octet-stream and not as application/pdf.
That alone would be enough to force a file save as but the site serves this file also with a "content-disposition: attachment" header with always forces a save as window.


 HTTP/1.0 200 OK
 Content-Type: application/octet-stream; charset=UTF-8
 Cache-Control: max-age=1, must-revalidate
 Date: Wed, 10 Dec 2014 23:56:05 GMT
 Last-Modified: Wed, 04 Nov 2009 22:07:14 GMT
 ETag: "1257372434539"
 Content-Length: 3964021
 content-disposition: attachment; filename="benny2008-Lodamin-NEWS.pdf"
 X-Content-Type-Options: nosniff
 X-Frame-Options: SAMEORIGIN
 X-XSS-Protection: 1; mode=block
 Server: GSE
 Alternate-Protocol: 443:quic,p=0.02
 Connection: Keep-Alive

Comment 6

[Christopher M. Penalver]

 Matthias Versen, thank you for the clarification. This is now documented in https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Firefox , and submitted for inclusion into the official Mozilla documentation as per https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/set-how-firefox-handles-different-file-types/revision/84202 . I'm perfectly fine with this not working as one would expect, as long as it's documented.