227590 - Warn user when launching executable content from Download Manager

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Toolkit :: Downloads API, enhancement)

Description

[Paul Hardacre]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.6b) Gecko/20031203 Firebird/0.7+
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.6b) Gecko/20031203 Firebird/0.7+

With the old download windows, when you launched an executable file you got a
security warning saying that "This is an executable file and may contain a
virus, yada yada.. Do you want to continue?" With the new download manager this
no longer happens.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Download an executable file
2. Launch it from the download manager


Actual Results:  
Executable launched.

Expected Results:  
Popped up a security warning..

Comment 1

[Mike Connor [:mconnor]]

I thought this was already decided against.  No one reads dialogs because
there's too many.  Those who are concerned enough about security to read that
dialog are smart enough to know its an .exe, and those who don't care enough to
read it would open it even if they did.

Comment 2

[Jesse Ruderman]

When you download 30 porn movie clips from the same site, do you check the
extension of each one?  I don't.

Comment 3

[Ali Ebrahim]

I'm assuming that the reporter double clicked on the file in the DL manager to
open it (I can't find any other UI to do this). Request for "Launch" button to
be added is in bug 227435.

In any case, I agree that there should be some kind of notification when
launching any of the following on Windows at least (list not exhaustive):
[exe,bat,pif,scr,shs,com]. If this seems like annoying UI, just put a "Don't
bother me about this again" checkbox on the warning.

I'm marking this as an enhancement, because I think that's a fair description of
what this is, given Ben's focus here is also to minimise user thinking while
downloading.

Comment 4

[Ray Birks]

Reporter, the requested enhancement was apparently added to the trunk on
12/18/2003, according to The Burning Edge: http://www.squarefree.com/burningedge/ 
(see 2003-12-19 green box of Fixes.)

When a post-12/18 trunk build for WindowsXP is available in a few days, please
test again.

Comment 5

[Ali Ebrahim]

Confirming fix as per comment 4.