1487641 - download continuosly aktivates a new tab

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 218257

(Firefox :: File Handling, defect)

Description

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User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:62.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/62.0
Build ID: 20180827144429

Steps to reproduce:

tried to download a pdf here:
https://www.datenschutz.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/checkliste-datenschutzaudit.pdf



Actual results:

the browser starts every millisecond a new tab (until you quit the browser). No file is downloaded.
This seems to happen with other downloads too.


Expected results:

I would have expeted that ONE download is started and the file being downloaded.

Comment 1

[Gingerbread Man]

1. Enter about:support into the location bar.
2. Click the Open Folder button. This opens a file manager window with your Firefox profile folder.
3. Exit Firefox.
4. Back in the file manager window, delete the handlers.json file.


If you get a "What should Firefox do with this file?" dialog and you choose to open with Firefox, that will create an infinite loop. That dialog is for external applications only, and you're not supposed to be able to pick Firefox there [1]. To do that safely, use the Open in Browser extension [2].

The only way to view PDFs in Firefox is to set the action to "Preview in Firefox" in about:preferences. However, servers can still trigger the "What should Firefox do with this file?" dialog, usually by sending the Content-Disposition: attachment header. One way to get around that is the Bypass Forced Download extension [3]. Less commonly, they can also fail to correctly identify the file type by sending Content-Type: application/octet-stream. Extensions like Header Editor can override that [4].


[1] Bug 218257
[2] https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/open-in-browser/
[3] https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/bypass-forced-download/
[4] https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/header-editor/