126530 - Reloading resources handled by external applications

Status: NEW

(Firefox :: File Handling, enhancement)

Description

[mozilla3eran]

If a URL points to a resource whose content type is handled by an external
application (not Mozilla or a plugin), then there is no way to request a
refresh. For instance, if http://foo.com/news.doc has changed but is already
cached, you cannot ask Mozilla to retrieve the current version.

Even clearing the memory and disk cache may not help, since the old version may
be cached in intermediate proxies and normal HTTP retrieval, unlike a refresh,
does not issue a "Cache-Control: max-age=0" header.

Some possible solutions:

1. Add an "Open Refreshed" item to the context menu of links. Its action would
be similar to a click, except it would force a refresh. Note that this makes
sense for HTML resources too. However, it does not help when you enter the URL
manually rather than follow a link.

2. Make Alt-click have a similar effect.

3. Drag&drop a link onto the refresh button, or vice versa. 
   (Highly nonstandard.)

4. Currently, when you attempt to open an externally handled resource, the
external application is activated but the logical "current URL" of the Mozilla
windows where you were working is unchanged. This makes sense when you follow a
link, but in two other cases it's reasonable to change the behavior: when the
URL is entered manually (e.g., using the URL bar) and when you use "Open in New
Window" or "Open in New Tab". In these cases Mozilla can record the new URL, and
then the Refresh button would refresh and reload the external resource. Alas,
this would usually mean that you need to first load the old version and close
it, and then load the new version.

BuildID:    2002020406

Comment 1

[Vaclav Dvorak]

Actually, the same problem is with content that will be saved to disk, i.e. when
no application is associated with the MIME type.

I agree with the "Open refreshed" hyperlink context menu option, and perhaps
also "Save refreshed link as", but then the menu is getting too long, I guess.
For pages that you open by typing into the location field, Shift+Enter (in
analogy with Shift+Reload mouse click) could do the trick, and Shift+click/enter
on bookmarks.

There is one more situation where this does not help: when you submit a
POST-form and the result is something that you want saved to the disk,
refreshed. For that, a "Submit and reload" ("submit refreshed" doesn't seem to
make sense) menu option should be in the context menu on submit buttons. I have
been missing this possibility very much.

Actually, the said form could be submitted programatically, triggered by a
completely different action, and then I'm really short on ideas how to force a
reload of the result.

Comment 2

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

To file handling.  This would be nice... can't think of how to do it, though.

Comment 3

[Scott Gifford]

*** Bug 209627 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 4

[Scott Gifford]

An interesting solution would be to present an intermediate page representing
that link.  That would solve some other problems, too, such as the difficulty of
bookmarking an externally viewed document and the odd effect of opening a PDF
file in a new tab.

For example, when I click on a PDF link I would see in the browser a page which
says "Now downloading myfile.pdf" with the PDF's URL in the URLbar, and the
download would initiate and the viewer launch.  I could then use all of
Mozilla's normal interfaces for working with that page---refresh or
shift-refresh to request that the document be requested fresh, bookmarks for
saving the URL, Send Page to email the document to somebody, Page Info to see
content-type and other information, etc.

Another place for this interface could be in the Download Manager.

Comment 5

[Daniel B.]

Note bug 288462.