290609 - Downloaded pdfs not recognized as pdfs

Status: NEW

Description

[Neal Weiner]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.7.7) Gecko/20050414 Firefox/1.0.3
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.7.7) Gecko/20050414 Firefox/1.0.3

When downloading pdfs from certain websites, the first download doesn't see the
file as pdf, while if I download again, it recognizes it and opens it. This
happens invariably on arxiv.org, the physics preprints archive. For instance,
see any of the pdf links on http://arxiv.org/list/hep-ph/new

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Go to http://arxiv.org/list/hep-ph/new
2. Click on any of the pdf links (file will not open)
3. Click on the same link (file will download again and now open)

Actual Results:  
On the first download, the file did not open in preview. On the second, the file
did open.

Expected Results:  
The file should have been recognized as pdf and opened in preview on the first
download. Right now the file type is seen as "document" and not "pdf"

Comment 1

[Steve England [:stevee]]

WFM Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.8b2) Gecko/20050416
Firefox/1.0+ & Acrobat 7.01

Comment 2

[Hiro]

Confirm.
And in Camino, the PDF file cannot be opened even if it downloads it several times. 

- Camino trunk build 2005041622 (v0.8+)
- Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; ja-JP; rv:1.8b2)
Gecko/20050416 Firefox/1.0+

Comment 3

[Ray Kiddy]

Are these all dupes of each other? Or perhaps related to another meta-bug?

Bug 283038 – Mac: firefox suggests Adobe Acrobat as default PDF app instead of Preview (edit)
Bug 354971 – Insufficient options when opening PDF files (edit)
Bug 290609 – Downloaded pdfs not recognized as pdfs (edit)
Bug 299849 – Mime type ignored for a PDF or JPEG responses. (edit)

Comment 4

[Dan Browne]

I am also experiencing this problem. Additional information can be found on the following mozillazine thread:

http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=644597

There are a number of ideas in that thread about the possible cause of this bug.

Also it has been suggested that 

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=311742

may be related.

Comment 5

[Dan Browne]

The following workaround fixes the arxiv.org problem:

Install User Agent Switcher extension.
Choose a Windows useragent.
Reload the arxiv.org page.

The reason for this is that arxiv is sending out different file headers when the user agent is Windows to when the UA is Mac!

Does this mean the bug lies with arxiv.org? Or should Firefox be able to handle these headers correctly anyway? Safari certainly manages ok.

Comment 6

[Dan Browne]

I have found another site which suffers a similar problem:

http://www.aboutmyvote.co.uk/

Unfortunately to find the relavant links you need to click through via the "register to vote" link and choose a voting district - I couldn't find a direct URL to relevant pages.

Clicking on the link halfway down voter registration form page "Download your registration form" delivers a PDF file.

Safari saves this as servelet.cfm.pdf
Firefox beta 3 for Mac saves this as servelet.cfm

Firefox beta 3 for PC also saves the file as servelet.cfm suggesting Firefox for PC also has this problem.

Comment 7

[Chad Woolley]

Wells Fargo Online also has this problem with all PDF statements.

Comment 8

[Dan Jacobson]

Enormous frustration in trying to get
http://download.microsoft.com/download/0/4/E/04E076D4-60B2-4D31-BCC7-C4805B558DBB/Bing%20product%20guidelines.pdf
to load in pdfjs with one single click.