1694553 - : ? * (colon, question mark, asterisk) are omitted from saved file names on Linux

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox :: File Handling, enhancement)

Description

[Pepe Portillo]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:85.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/85.0

Steps to reproduce:

Click any "save" link in a webpage.

Actual results:

If the filename given contains signs as :?* they are automatically (without notification) deleted. That's ok for MS Windows, for those symbols are invalid in filenames in a NTFS volume. But, are valid characters in ext4 (most popular Linux file system) and other file systems.

Expected results:

Firefox should check the filesystem of the volume the file is going to be saved on. If that filesystem support those characters :?* for filenames, Firefox should leave it as is. If not, is ok for Firefox to delete/change but NOT without a message to the user.

Some of us love ext4 for its capability of using those characters in filenames.

Comment 1

[:Gijs (he/him)]

(In reply to Pepe Portillo from comment #0)

Firefox should check the filesystem of the volume the file is going to be saved on.

This is a ton of complexity, will probably require IO, and, in some cases (flatpak / snap and such sandboxed environments), may not be possible at all.

If that filesystem support those characters :?* for filenames, Firefox should leave it as is. If not, is ok for Firefox to delete/change but NOT without a message to the user.

Some of us love ext4 for its capability of using those characters in filenames.

And you are welcome to rename files later using a tool of your choice. It doesn't really make sense for Firefox to support these characters in file names, also because when saving complete HTML pages, relative links are broken because those characters need escaping in URLs. The complexity of making the serialization of HTML depend on the filesystem onto which the page is being saved is not justified by the ability to use those characters.