218470 - Mozilla should not "download" (copy) local files to download directory

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 73757

(SeaMonkey :: Download & File Handling, enhancement)

Description

[RT]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.4) Gecko/20030624
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.4) Gecko/20030624

Many people have CDROM documentation, often containing large PDF documents.

On such CDROMs there is a top-level HTML file which hyperlinks in many
sub-directories or chapters of the documentation.

It is very UN-nice to use Mozilla to view such CDROMs, as it appears Mozilla
insists on copying the file, even though it is a local file and not one obtained
over a network, into the local directory.

Not only is this wasted time but it hogs disk space unnecessarily, and forces
the user to clean up all files he has viewed from the downloads directory.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Type file://<some-path>/<some pdf or txt file> into the location bar
2. That file is copied into the download directory.

Actual Results:  
See details.

Expected Results:  
Mozilla should just open the helper application directly on the local file (i.e.
the one on the CDROM).  Both Safari and IE do it that way, and it's a much more
intuitive and convenient approach for the user (never mind if it is inconsistent
from a coding point of view).

Comment 1

[Matthias Versen [:Matti]]

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 73757 ***