167320 - eternal/endless/infinite loop when associating Firefox/SeaMonkey/Mozilla as a helper application for a given file type

Status: NEW

(Firefox :: File Handling, defect)

Description

[chimera]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Win 9x 4.90; en-US; rv:1.1) Gecko/20020826
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Win 9x 4.90; en-US; rv:1.1) Gecko/20020826

I think the download manager should either prevent the user from choosing
mozilla itself as "open with", or (better) figure out that the user wants the
file opened in the browser, not by the download manager at all.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. download a binary file
2. choose mozilla.exe to handle file
3. uncheck the box 'always ask'
4. have fun...

Comment 1

[Kenneth Herron]

*** Bug 201565 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 2

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

*** Bug 214157 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 3

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

*** Bug 205826 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 4

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

*** Bug 208636 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 5

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

.

Comment 6

[Tim]

*** Bug 215554 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 7

[Simon Paquet [:sipaq]]

*** Bug 222833 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 8

[Jo Hermans]

*** Bug 229852 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 9

[Christian :Biesinger (don't email me, ping me on IRC)]

*** Bug 213316 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 10

[Christian :Biesinger (don't email me, ping me on IRC)]

*** Bug 208231 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 11

[Christian :Biesinger (don't email me, ping me on IRC)]

*** Bug 235027 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 12

[Erik Fabert]

*** Bug 264356 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 13

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

*** Bug 266598 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 14

[Erik Fabert]

*** Bug 276343 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 15

[:Gavin Sharp [email: [e-mail]]]

*** Bug 280462 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 16

[OstGote!]

*** Bug 295955 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 17

[:Gavin Sharp [email: [e-mail]]]

*** Bug 317670 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 18

[Adam Guthrie]

*** Bug 316261 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 19

[JoSH Lehan]

An enhancement would be to have an additional choice in the download window ("What should Firefox do with this file?"):

"Attempt to display file"

This would force the browser to render it internally, using whatever fallback mechanisms the browser has, ignoring MIME type.

In most cases, this will work just fine.  There's a lot of websites out there that serve content that can be seen just fine in a browser, but for whatever reason has the wrong MIME type encoded, or has the EMBED tag around it, or something like that.  This confuses the browser, and so the user can't easily open the content just by clicking on it.

If there's already a bug open for this enhancement, please link it here.

Comment 20

[Brian Ewins]

In response to comment #19: the enhancement is in Bug 196078 for text/* documents, and Bug 57342 for everything else. 

Comment 21

[Mike Connor [:mconnor]]

*** Bug 351223 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 29

[James May [:fowl2]]

Would it not be possible to detect that the file open request came from the OS (command line parameter) and not defer to helper applications in that case, ie. error message.

Trying to detect the source or destination seems foolhardy.

(I'm not sure if this is the right bug. Bug 218257 Bug 215554 are newer.)

Comment 30

[Christian :Biesinger (don't email me, ping me on IRC)]

Maybe, but the problem is of course that the code that does the helper app launching doesn't know that the URL came from the command line, so this would require quite a bit of code changes.

Comment 36

[[e-mail]]

Oh guys, I'm so sorry this was a dupe. I really did look at the list given and used the keywords of ".do open file" and "infinite loop" to try to find it but there was a list SOOOO long and it was definitely not in the first 100 that came back. I don't mean to fill up the system with dupes, but it sure would be nice to have this fixed! Thank you for checking it out. :) Your work on this browser is VERY appreciated!! Firefox is the best!

Comment 44

[Majken Connor [:Kensie]]

This bug is like an easter egg! 10 years old, critical but most people probably don't hit it ;) I hit it trying to open PDFs, it wasn't opening in Aurora so I tried choosing Aurora. It worked for the first PDF I tried it on, then the 2nd one looped :D At least the browser was responsive and I could exit (yay session store!)

Comment 51

[Abashkin Alexander]

13 years old ;(

Comment 52

[Paul17041993]

I'm curious why we still allow FF to select itself and loop in such a way, especially considering how easy it is to do and it can effectively brick the profile (and system if it has low resources).

Comment 56

[david.beers]

This is still happening in 71.0b6 (64-bit) on Windows 10.

Comment 57

[Tawanda Kanhema]

:david.beers, Is this still happening in Firefox 74?

Comment 58

[flip]

Still happening in 75.0b5 on macOS Catalina

Comment 60

[david.beers]

(In reply to Tawanda Kanhema from comment #57)

:david.beers, Is this still happening in Firefox 74?

Sorry for not responding! It does not seem like it's happening on 76.0b3 on Windows 10 1909 64-bit build 18363.752. I downloaded a test .zip file from https://www.thinkbroadband.com/download and chose Firefox to "Open with". The file downloads and Firefox tries to open it from the local storage which just makes it ask to download it again. Is that what's supposed to happen? Either way, I'm not getting an endless loop of anything.