297627 - Opening a file of unknown type causes a cryptic and incomplete message box.

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 290829

(SeaMonkey :: General, defect)

Description

[Pim Blokland]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.8) Gecko/20050511
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.8) Gecko/20050511

In Windows, when instructing the browser to open a local file with a type
Mozilla doesn't know, the message box that pops up (asking what to do) does not
have all parameters filled in.


Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Create a file having an unknown file type, e.g. STU.VWX
2. Drag this file to Mozilla's icon, or tell Mozilla to open this file, or put a
link to it in a small HTML file and click on the link.


Actual Results:  
Opening #1
The file "#3" is of type #2 (#1), and #4 does not know how to handle this file
type. This file is located at:
What should Mozilla do with this file?
(...)

Expected Results:  
Opening STU.VWX
The file "STU.VWX" is of type Unknown, and Mozilla does not know how to handle
this file type. This file is located at:
file:///C:/temp/
What should Mozilla do with this file?
(...)

I can reproduce this phenomenon only with local files. When loading from a http
or ftp site, the site always returns a MIME type, so it's not unknown, and you
get a "normal" message box (like the expected results).

As to the severity of this problem, I'd assign it as "cosmetic" for myself, but
I can imagine people getting severely confused by this screen and wouldn't know
how to proceed.

Comment 1

[Pim Blokland]

Oh, I forget to say, this problem presents itself in v1.7.8, but not in several
1.8 nightlies. And it wasn't there in v1.7.5, nor in Netscape 7.2 (=v1.7.2). So
it's localized to the branch, and also fairly recent.

Comment 2

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

bug 290829 does not have approval for the branch yet...

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 290829 ***

Comment 3

[Pim Blokland]

(In reply to comment #2)
> bug 290829 does not have approval for the branch yet...

Oh... but it is marked "FIXED". That's indirectly the reason I submitted this
one: I searched Bugzilla, but only the unresolved bugs (the default setting from
the home page) so this solved one never showed up.
Since it's an existing bug in the real world (in the official Mozilla Suite
v1.7.8 release version) I never thought to search the solved entries!
Moreover, I saw that more duplicates of this bug were posted, probably all by
people who hadn't thought to search the solved bugs too. Does this happen more
often?