270126 - Support import of shortcuts to local files (.LNK)

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox :: Migration, enhancement)

Description

[Richard Atkins]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041107 Firefox/1.0
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041107 Firefox/1.0

Import during install of Firefox fails to collect any shortcuts to local HTML
pages from my Favorites folder. It does however manage to import all of my
"Internet Shortcut"s.

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1. Load a local HTML file in IE.
2. Drag the document icon from the location box onto IE's Links bar (this
creates a Shortcut, rather than an Internet Shortcut).
3. Install Firefox and import IE favorites.
Actual Results:  
Firefox imports all internet shortcuts, but no (regular windows) shortcuts.

Expected Results:  
Firefox's links bar should contain all shortcuts (internet or otherwise), or
internet shortcuts to the same shortcuts. Changing a local file link to a URL
would just involve prepending it with file:/// and reversing any backslashes.
Changing a UNC path (eg \\machine\share\file.html) file link to a URL would
involve prepending it simply with file: and reversing backslashes.

A workaround for the import problem would be to copy the shortcuts into Firefox
by hand, but this can be time consuming and frustrating (since it's awkward to
compare the contents of the Favorites folder with those in the bookmarks
manager, and painful to add new shortcuts for each link missing).

Also, technically speaking, file: URLs should not need rewriting at all (they're
meant to get passed unchanged to the underlying filesystem), but Firefox doesn't
seem to do this the way I'd expect either. Opening UNC files directly into
Firefox results in URLs like "file://///machine/share/file.html", which is silly.

Comment 1

[Alex Eng]

Reproduced on Firefox 1.0+
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Win98; en-US; rv:1.8a6) Gecko/20050108 Firefox/1.0+

Confirming.  Note carefully the reporter's distinction between "Internet
shortcuts" and "shortcuts to local HTML pages."  While Firefox will import IE
Favorites (i.e., the shortcut files ending in .URL), it will not import IE
Favorites created exactly as described in the Steps to Reproduce (i.e., the
shortcut file created when using drag and drop in IE is an ordinary Windows .LNK
shortcut).

Accordingly, the summary has been edited for clarity.

Comment 2

[Mike Connor [:mconnor]]

There's a lot of good reasons for not doing this, not the least of which is that
there's a lot of abuse of the Links toolbar by various spyware-like apps, and
second to which that our behaviour is very different from IE's when clicking a
link to a file that won't be displayed inline.

Leaving as an enhancement for now, but this is minor enough compared to the
potential downside of having links to apps that act very much unlike IE (which
I've seen bugs on).

Comment 3

[Mike Connor [:mconnor]]

sorry for bugspam, long-overdue mass reassign of ancient QA contact bugs, filter on "beltznerLovesGoats" to get rid of this mass change

Comment 4

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

I agree with comment 2, and making it de-facto.