288130 - file dialog opening convention for .pdf links now different from Netscape 7.2

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 255181

(Firefox :: General, defect)

Description

[John Sellers]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.6) Gecko/20050223 Firefox/1.0.1
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.6) Gecko/20050223 Firefox/1.0.1

When shift-click is used on a .pdf link in Netscape 7.2, the file dialog to save
the .pdf file is opened.

In Firefox, the behavior is now gone, and it is impossible to find out how to
open the file dialog for .pdf when using Firefox.  That behavior is either
completely missing or obscured for most or all users.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Do a Google search which results in links to .pdf files
2. Place cursor over .pdf link
3. Left cliok with shift key held down
Actual Results:  
In Netscape 7.2, this opens the "save" file dialog.
However, in Firefox the shift is ignored, and the Acrobat plug-in opens in Firefox.


Expected Results:  
Since there is no special behavior with shift-left-click, there is no reason for
the behavior to be different from the current version of Netscape, which is 7.2

The reason that the missing behavior is so important is that the Acrobat plug-in
when large documents are open can be problematic because download status
concurrent with display in URL is confusing and does not work well.  One may be
able to display only part of a document for a long time if a large document is
being downloaded.

A much smoother, comfortable behavior is to open the file save dialog box and
save the document.  Issues such as not knowing if the document is now local and
completely accessible through Acrobat are not existant when using the
shift-left-click method of getting access to a remote .pdf document.

Comment 1

[Matthias Versen [:Matti]]

Did you try alt-left-click ?
shift-left-click is now "open link in new window" but I don't know why they
chnaged that (that doesn't make sense for me)

Comment 2

[John Sellers]

alt-left-click works fine.  That input was helpful.  But it brings up the point.
 How does one find such information except word of mouth.  I took a good solid
hour trying to find how to bring up the dialog.

I like it because "alt" is short for alternative, which is exactly what is
needed: An alternative behavior to Acrobat plug-in.

For the future, wouldn't context help on all navigation behavior make sense in
such a way that any link could steer to help about its behavior?  I think I will
put in another bugzila suggestion report linked to this one.

Comment 3

[Jesse Ruderman]

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 255181 ***