267164 - undeclared "file" URLs are falsely treated as "http" URLs

Status: RESOLVED EXPIRED

(Core :: Networking, defect)

Description

[Benjamin]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; rv:1.7.3) Gecko/20041001 Firefox/0.10.1
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; rv:1.7.3) Gecko/20041001 Firefox/0.10.1

My office constantly uses HREFs of the following form to load files on the local
network:
a href="\\dalai\public\slides\ten_slides--v3a.ppt"
Internet explorer correctly converts this to "FILE://DALAI/PUBLIC..." but
FireFox converts it to relative local url
"HTTP://WWW.MYOFFICE.COM/OURINTRANET/\\DALAI\PUBLIC..."
This is a significant bug because this is the standard shorthand for loading
files over the local windows network.

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1.
2.
3.

Comment 1

[Mike Connor [:mconnor]]

if you're going to say IE is "correct" in munging the path like this, at least
show where anything in the HTML spec etc it says to munge UNC paths into file://
elements.

Having read the spec, we're handling this correct, per the spec.  This would at
best be a quirk... dumping to Browser to see what's what.

Comment 2

[timeless]

we're not fixing this. fix your content.

Comment 3

[Benjamin]

(In reply to comment #2)
> we're not fixing this. fix your content.

Doh.  I already fixed *my* content, that's not the problem.  If it was about
that, I wouldn't have submitted the bug.  The problem is that this is PERCEIVED
to be standard use short-hand for microsoft networking, which is broadly used. 
Mike Conner is right about how we're technically correct already.  But in this
case, we must go very slightly beyond the spec (not violating it) because
otherwise a lot of important business users will PERCEIVE this as a bug.  This
is not a technical bug, but it's a significant and widespread Public Relations
bug.  (I'm not reassigning this out of respect for your good judgement, but I
think we should do so.)

Comment 4

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

> I'm not reassigning this

let me note that this has the correct assignee currently. (it is also not marked
invalid, at least not yet...)

Comment 5

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

This has been discussed before, at length.  There's simply no way to "fix" this
without breaking valid use cases.  Please look up the existings
(invalid/wontfix) bugs on this issue and mark this duplicate of the relevant one.

Comment 6

[benc]

What is being used to create this document? 

Comment 7

[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 8

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

This bug has been automatically resolved after a period of inactivity (see above
comment). If anyone thinks this is incorrect, they should feel free to reopen it.