245891 - Microsoft Word documents altered during download cannot open

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Tech Evangelism Graveyard :: English US, defect)

Description

[Ernest Vincent Pons-Worley]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.7) Gecko/20040517 Camino/0.8b
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.7) Gecko/20040517 Camino/0.8b

Whether Microsoft Word is set up as the helper application, or a Word document
is downloaded, say to the desktop, it will not open.  Instead a dialog box asks
what file type to convert from--e.g., text, and so on.  I am able to open Word
documents downloaded from a web site using Interent Explorer with Word set up as
the helper application.  It would be nice if I could do this with Firefox and/or
Camino.  (Same problem with Camino).  I'm a grad student and I'm forced to
download Word documents from an educational site--i.e., I don't have the option
to download rtf instead.

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1. Go to any site where a Word document is available for download
2. Download the Word document
3. Try to open the Word document--it won't open.

Actual Results:  
Microsoft Word does not recognize downloaded document as a Word document.

Expected Results:  
Any *.doc document should open with MS Word.

Word document opens if downloaded with other browser--e.g., IE.  Conclusion:
Firefox and Camino are altering Word document during download process.

Comment 1

[Ali Ebrahim]

Reporter is seeing this with Firefox/Camino both. Suggests this is a Browser
bug, not Firefox.

Comment 2

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

can you give an example url?

if you choose "text" as file format, how does it look?

Comment 3

[Ernest Vincent Pons-Worley]

(In reply to comment #2)
> can you give an example url?
> 
> if you choose "text" as file format, how does it look?

You can recover text but lose formatting (underline, italics, double spacing, etc.)  The website I 
access is password protected--it is a university website.  I'll see if I can find a Word document on a 
site that is not password proteced and write again.  Thanks, EVP-W

Comment 4

[Frankie]

First guess is that UCSC is sending .doc with Content-Type: text/plain or
something similar.

Ernest, what happens when you download a Word doc from somewhere else, such as
http://www.calstate.edu/PreDoc/05-06PreDocApplicationPacketWEB.doc

Comment 5

[Ernest Vincent Pons-Worley]

Well, I clicked on the link and the file downloaded and opened with the helper
application (MS Word in this case) like it's supposed to.  I think you figured
it out!  Thanks.

Comment 6

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

This is an automated message, with ID "auto-resolve01".

This bug has had no comments for a long time. Statistically, we have found that
bug reports that have not been confirmed by a second user after three months are
highly unlikely to be the source of a fix to the code.

While your input is very important to us, our resources are limited and so we
are asking for your help in focussing our efforts. If you can still reproduce
this problem in the latest version of the product (see below for how to obtain a
copy) or, for feature requests, if it's not present in the latest version and
you still believe we should implement it, please visit the URL of this bug
(given at the top of this mail) and add a comment to that effect, giving more
reproduction information if you have it.

If it is not a problem any longer, you need take no action. If this bug is not
changed in any way in the next two weeks, it will be automatically resolved.
Thank you for your help in this matter.

The latest beta releases can be obtained from:
Firefox:     http://www.mozilla.org/projects/firefox/
Thunderbird: http://www.mozilla.org/products/thunderbird/releases/1.5beta1.html
Seamonkey:   http://www.mozilla.org/projects/seamonkey/

Comment 7

[Frankie]

Every publicly accessible Word doc at UCSC now has Content-Type: application/msword