11521 - View as different media (mime) type support

Status: NEW

(SeaMonkey :: UI Design, enhancement)

Description

[Matthew Tuck [:CodeMachine]]

This is two related RFEs.

(a) Add a menu option called "View As..." to allow you to view something as
another media type.

Very popular would be view as text.  This would allow for example a poor man's
page source (minus the syntax highlighting features).

Also useful would be if the page is stuffed up and expects a browser, ie IE, to
go by extension rather than media type, since you could manually override this.

(b) When you get the dialog that says More Info/Pick App/Save File/Cancel, add
another option "View As...".

Comment 1

[leger]

Updating QA Contact.

Comment 2

[don]

Move to M20.

Comment 3

[Paul MacQuiddy]

updating qa contact

Comment 4

[don]

Move to "Future" milestone.

Comment 5

[Asa Dotzler [:asa]]

*** Bug 47415 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 6

[Viswanath Ramachandran]

Since Don has left, Vishy is taking his bugs in bulk, pending reassignment.
thanks,
	Vishy

Comment 7

[Paul Chen]

nav triage team:

Too much work to support translation between media types and do it well, not 
going to get to this for beta1, marking nsbeta1-

Comment 8

[Simon Fraser [no longer active]]

Does the underlying functionality exist? Editor needs to be able to tell .js 
files to be loaded as text, for example, so that we edit them like text files 
(since they are UTF-8 and many text editor can't deal with that).

How hard would it be to override the document's MIME type some time early in the 
loading process?

Comment 9

[Matthew Tuck [:CodeMachine]]

Can someone in the know say if there is anything here that requires API changes
that should be nominated as needing to be in before Mozilla 1.0?

Comment 10

[[e-mail]]

This would be a very useful feature, because (shamefully), it would make it 
easier for http server administrators to verify they selected the right MIME 
type w/o repeatedly reconfiguring their server...

Comment 11

[Jonas Jørgensen]

*** Bug 156788 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 12

[Dan Mosedale (:dmosedale, :dmose)]

Given that Vishy's no longer working on Mozilla, perhaps bz or law would like
this one...

Comment 13

[Blake Ross]

Reassigning to a real person.

Comment 14

[Piotr Banasik]

(continuation/addition to my bug that as a dupe of this)
this bug is really obnoxious on scripted redirects .. like download trackers ..
because save link as saves it as the tracker file .. ie .. tracker.cgi instead
of myfile.rar .. I know this mostly is a server side issue and all .. but this
is getting me really annoyed with mozilla .. when download links start showing
up as plain text instead of downloading .. could someone update here if they're
working on a fix for this please.

Comment 15

[Jonas Jørgensen]

*** Bug 166354 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 16

[Jonas Jørgensen]

Related/dupe: Bug 57342, Add "View as Text" option for unknown mime content-type.

Comment 17

[Max Alekseyev]

*** Bug 57342 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 18

[Ryan Gammon]

I'm trying to address this bug through a mozdev.org project based around a
nsIHttpNotify component.

I'm trying to change the content type in nsIHttpNotify::OnExamineResponse via a
call to nsHttpChannel::SetResponseHeader("Content-Type", ...)

This is explicity blocked in nsHttpChannel.cpp:2734 (returns NS_ERROR_ILLEGAL_VALUE)

Any chance of getting a patch accepted that would change this behavior?

Comment 19

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

Why not just call SetContentType instead?

Comment 20

[Ryan Gammon]

Oops. I've got it working now -- if I change from text/html to text/plain, I get
html source in my browser window, as expected. Thanks!

Comment 21

[Ryan Gammon]

I have a project at http://forcecontenttype.mozdev.org that would address the
original fellow's issue.

Comment 22

[Christian :Biesinger (don't email me, ping me on IRC)]

y'know, this bug's summary sucks, I was unable to find it.

anyway, my work in bug 57342 adds the required backend stuff, and will probably
add the ui too. taking.

Comment 23

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

*** Bug 227731 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 24

[Christian :Biesinger (don't email me, ping me on IRC)]

actually... I will not fix a) from comment 0, at least not anytime soon, so back
to default owner; I'll do b) in bug 57342.

Comment 25

[Biju]

Bug# 207154 is a duplicate of this bug
I am looking to get context menu like attachment 125014 [details]

Comment 26

[Edward Elliott]

The extension at http://forcecontenttype.mozdev.org/ looks perfect, at least
until this behavior is implemented in the main codebase.  Unfortunately it won't
install in Firefox (1.0.2+).  This bug has been open for 6 years.  We should be
mortified.

Comment 27

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

Edward, who is this "we"?  Some people have been working on the back-end changes
needed to fix this correctly.  If you think you can do a better job, feel free
to fix the bug -- notice the "helpwanted" keyword.

Comment 28

[Edward Elliott]

(In reply to comment #27)
> Edward, who is this "we"?  Some people have been working on the back-end changes
> needed to fix this correctly.  If you think you can do a better job, feel free
> to fix the bug -- notice the "helpwanted" keyword.

Sorry if my info is out of date.  From this bug report, the only signs of
activity in 5 years are vague mentions of internals and one extension 2 years
ago.  If something's being done, there's no indication here.  What is the
current state of affairs?

Comment 29

[Justin Kerk]

The forcecontenttype UI is really overkill for this, something like bug 57342
comment #143 sounds perfect - a View->Show As or View->MIME Type menu item next
to Character Encoding.

Comment 30

[u41249]

Recently I was trying to view DTD file in Firefox 1.0.7 - with no luck at all.
It was either providing option to save file on local disk, or open it with
default external application.
Unfortunately, I would like to view it as XML - convenient but not available.
So there is my .50 cents. (And a vote too)

Comment 32

[Eric Haszlakiewicz]

The "Open in Browser" addon (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/8207/) does exactly what is needed, at least in my opinion.  It should be included by default.