137532 - epfl.ch - text/plain .gz and .dmg files are rendered inline

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Tech Evangelism Graveyard :: German, defect)

Description

[Josh Whitver]

From Bugzilla Helper:
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en-US; rv:0.9.9+)
Gecko/20020412
BuildID:    2002041203

If you visit either of the URLs listed above (or any URL that is a .dmg or .gz
file), Mozilla will try to render it inline instead of offering to download the
file.  

Mozilla should try to save to disk any file that ends in .dmg or .gz, not render it.

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1. Visit the URLs mentioned (or any URL that is a .dmg or .gz file)


Actual Results:  Mozilla spits out garbage text

Expected Results:  Mozilla should have offered to download the file to disk.

Comment 1

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

http://s.sudre.free.fr/Software/files/diablotin.dmg.gz is sent as text/plain by
the server (with a content encoding of x-gzip).  

http://dewww.epfl.ch/~dkocher/cyberduck/Cyberduck.dmg  is sent as text/plain by
the server.

The only reasonable thing for a browser to do with those files given what the
server sends is to render them inline, and all browsers I have tested (lynx,
links, amaya, NS4, Mozilla) save IE do that.

Over to tech evangelism...  Please file a separate bug on one of those urls and
leave this one to cover the other one.

Comment 2

[Chris Meiering]

I have to say that I can't think of a single instance in the history of my
personal web browsing where I have wanted a .gz file rendered on my screen. IE
for mac handles the links above exaclty like they should be handled...it
downloads .gz files.

Can anyone give me a good reason as to why .gz files should be rendered in the
browser window? The only answer I will *not* accept is that the server is
sending the file as text and thus the browser should render it as such. Hogwash.
There are literally thousands upon thousands (probably millions) of servers out
there that are not configured correctly to serve .gz as binary (I think the
default apache setup serves them as text). I can understand the idealistic goal
of compliance, but to adhere to that stance against all logic, especially when
it only hurts the enduser and sours their Mozilla experience, is simply stupid.

Mozilla *should* automatically download .gz files; or at the very least provide
a mechanism to do so *automatically* such as a pref or even an undocumented hack.

Comment 3

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

There is nothing that a priori assigns the .gz extension to anything useful.  If
I want to name a text file README.gz and post it on the website, I should be
able to do that (note that in such a case I could even make it be a gzip archive
of a text file, send it as text/plain and content-encoding: gzip and the browser
had better render that inline...)

Comment 4

[Frankie]

Although it's technically correct to display text/plain .gz files to the screen,
it would be friendlier to support some sort of quirks mode that allows users to
specify "always download the following suffixes"

Comment 5

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

Nothing to do with this bug.  If you want, feel free to file an enhancement
request on that.

Comment 6

[Frankie]

Since sudre.free.fr is covered in bug 155194, this bug should focus on epfl.ch.

Contact address is [e-mail]

I'll submit an RFE bug as soon as I find the bug asking to add a "View in
Browser" button to the "What should I do with this file?" dialog box.

Comment 7

[Kai Lahmann (is there, where MNG is)]

move...

Comment 8

[nucleos]

The bug has been fixed, since Mozilla now tries to understand what the file is
before displaying it.

Comment 9

[Matthias Versen [:Matti]]

404