310360 - PDF should be preferred over Postscript in network.http.accept.default

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox :: Settings UI, enhancement)

Description

[Vincent Lefevre]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.8b4) Gecko/20050908 Firefox/1.4
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.8b4) Gecko/20050908 Firefox/1.4

Under Mac OS X, PDF files are opened with Preview whereas Firefox asks to save
dowloaded Postscript files to disk. So, it would be wiser to prefer PDF files to
the Postscript files in the default value of network.http.accept.default, at
least under Mac OS X (ditto for MS-Window, AFAIK).

See the above URL as an example where some links (e.g. in the first item
CalLef2004a) provide HTTP content negociation.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:

Comment 1

[Adam Guthrie]

Wouldn't "*/*" cover this? Also, it should be up to the plugins to decide
whether or not Firefox can handle a certain type of file in this case... I
really don't see what the issue is here.

Comment 2

[Vincent Lefevre]

Firefox already accepts anything, as */*;q=0.5 is in the default value of
network.http.accept.default. The problem is that it gives PDF and Postscript the
same precedence, though users under Mac OS X (and MS-Windows and possibly other
systems) would prefer PDF. I suggest something like that:
  application/pdf;q=0.9
to be added (note: 0.9 so that PDF is seen as better than text/plain, which has
0.8 by default).

Concerning the plugins, I don't have any PDF plugin; the PDF viewer is started
by the system, as expected. I don't know if there is a way for the system to say
"I can support PDF" automatically and reliably. However Firefox should know that
PDF is very-well supported under Mac OS X; and this is probably true for the
other OS's too.

Comment 3

[Mike Connor [:mconnor]]

bloating http-accept for such a minor issue isn't going to happen, this is misfiled, but I know we've reduced it to fit in a single packet for speed/overhead reasons, and we're not going to bloat it back up.

Comment 4

[Vincent Lefevre]

OK, this makes sense.