308156 - "Save Link As..." results in a corrupted file if the server's response to the HEAD request contains a message-body

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 160454

(Toolkit :: Downloads API, defect)

Description

[liuwangxia]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9a1) Gecko/20050911 Firefox/1.6a1
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9a1) Gecko/20050911 Firefox/1.6a1

When I browse this URL, then right click a file link, choose "Save Link As...",
Firefox can't download it corrctly. Firefox can download the whole file, but add
some extra data before the file, so the file size is greater than the size that
it should be.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Just browse that URL.
2. Right click a file link,choose "Save Link As...".
3. View that file in a hex editor, you should find some extra data.
Actual Results:  
Firefox add some extra data before a file when using 'Save Link As...' to
download a file.

Expected Results:  
Download a file correctly.

Comment 1

[Antonis Christofides]

Hi, I had a similar problem on my web site and I think that it is because of incorrect server behavior.  It appears that when you use "Save Link As...", firefox first sends a HEAD request to the server before actually proceeding to GET the data.  Now servers frequently handle HEAD requests wrongly, and instead of returning http headers only, as dictated by RFC2616, they also return a message-body.  Until I discovered it and fixed it on my web site, the response to a HEAD was identical to that of a GET.  The site mentioned by the reporter also returns a short piece of html after the headers.  What firefox seems to do in that case (I tried 1.0.7 on Windows and 1.0.4 on Windows and Linux) is concatenate the message-body erroneously returned by the HEAD with the message-body correctly returned by the subsequent GET, resulting in a corrupted file.  Expected result:  Firefox should have ignored the message-body returned by the HEAD request.  Although I fixed that bug on my web site, I could recreate it for you if you need to experiment with it.

Comment 2

[Antonis Christofides]

This seems to be a dup of bug 160454.

Comment 3

[BugBot [:suhaib / :marco/ :calixte]]

In the process of migrating remaining bugs to the new severity system, the severity for this bug cannot be automatically determined. Please retriage this bug using the new severity system.

Comment 4

[BugBot [:suhaib / :marco/ :calixte]]

The severity field is not set for this bug.
:mak, could you have a look please?

For more information, please visit BugBot documentation.

Comment 5

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

let's assume this a dupe of bug 160454 as suggested in comment 2.
Any new bugs should probably be filed under Network, with a new example link.