1298735 - firefox fails to open local files specified as an argument containing a colon

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Core :: Networking, defect)

Description

[Christoph Anton Mitterer]

Hey.

When running something like:
$ firefox 'foo:bar.html'
i.e. openting a local file (or trying to) that contains a colon, firefox will give an error page that the protocol wasn't understood.

I'd generally say, that when an argument is given for which a local file exists, that should have precedence over anything else that FireFox could interpret, that is:
Even a for URI schemas FF actually knows it should rather open the local file *if* that exists under the path, so $ firefox http:foobar.html should open the file if it exists, and if not it should try to do this via networking.

I don't think this would cause much (if any) issues for existing users... only few probably open web URLs like http://example.org via agument passing and even if they do, it's probably unlikely that a local file of that name exists.

But at least, it should not fail to load local files, for which the URI schema is anyway not understood.

Cheers,
Chris.

Comment 1

[Michal Novotny [:michal]]

(In reply to Christoph Anton Mitterer from comment #0)
> I'd generally say, that when an argument is given for which a local file
> exists, that should have precedence over anything else that FireFox could
> interpret, that is:
> Even a for URI schemas FF actually knows it should rather open the local
> file *if* that exists under the path, so $ firefox http:foobar.html should
> open the file if it exists, and if not it should try to do this via
> networking.

I don't think local files should have higher priority. You can always use complete URI to solve this problem, i.e. firefox "file://$(pwd)/foo:bar.html". Escaping the colon would work too, so you can use firefox "foo%3Abar.html".