1433378 - Allow associating Firefox with those "other" file types which it supports - JPEG, PNG, GIF, SVG, PDF, BMP, etc.

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Firefox :: Settings UI, enhancement)

Description

[Rishabh Singla]

Attachment: Screenshot (1549).png

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; Win64; x64; rv:59.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/59.0
Build ID: 20180122192913

Steps to reproduce:

Installed Firefox.


Actual results:

Firefox didn't automatically associate itself with many of the file types that it supports. For example SVG, GIF, etc.


Expected results:

Firefox supports so many audio, image and video formats, as well as PDF documents. It should at least give an option to associate itself with all or some of these formats. Currently there's no easy way to use Firefox as the default viewer for, for example, SVG, GIF and PDF files. You have to know that you've to change the settings manually in Windows OS [I suspect most users don't know how to do this].

This way the "utility" of Firefox will increase, as Firefox will open more often on systems having these file types. When users will see FF more often, they'll use it more often, and it's likely that they'll stick with FF more.

Please see attached screenshot for file types currently "exposed" by FF to Windows for association.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_web_browsers#Image_format_support

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_layout_engines_(HTML5_media)

Comment 1

[Gingerbread Man]

:rstrong, can you make a decision on this and bug 565258?

Comment 2

[Robert Strong (they/them - no direct email)]

(In reply to Gingerbread Man from comment #1)
> :rstrong, can you make a decision on this and bug 565258?
Someone that works on shell integration (I no longer work on it) will need to.

Comment 3

[Masatoshi Kimura [:emk]]

For PDF, you can right click a PDF file, then select [Open With] > [Choose default program] to make Firefox the default PDF viewer.

Comment 4

[Rishabh Singla]

Obviously a user can right-click a PDF file and change the default program to Firefox. However, it would be better to have a single window inside Firefox's options/preferences/settings where you could see all the formats with which Firefox can be associated, and also the formats with which it is currently associated. Programs like WinRAR and 7-Zip have such windows and they are quite useful.

Comment 5

[:Gijs (he/him)]

This is effectively a request to add functionality to prefs, where our "make Firefox the default browser" UI lives.