314601 - Files downloaded and opened should be read-only

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 280419

(Toolkit :: Downloads API, defect)

Description

[Willem van Duijn]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9a1) Gecko/20051031 Firefox/1.6a1
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9a1) Gecko/20051031 Firefox/1.6a1

If a user chooses 'Open with [program]' (instead of 'save to') the file is put in a the temporal directory (temp). When the user modifies the opened file directly, and only says 'Save' it will only update the copy in the temporal directory, which is dangerous because these files can be deleted without warning.

So either a 'read-only' bit (mask) should be set, or such temporal files should be saved at a different -more safe- location.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
A possible scenario:

1. The user checks his e-mail with gmail.com, and finds an important Word document (s)he need to finish before tomorrow evening.
2. (S)he clicks the 'download' link, and Firefox asks what the user wants to do. (S)he clicks 'Open with Microsoft Word'.
3. The user spends several hours of work, chooses 'Save' in the File-menu, and goes to bed.
4. Next morning, she starts the browser, reads some news, and wants to open the Word-document again. (S)he can't find it anywere, panics and finally becomes suicidal.

Actual Results:  
File gone - unhappy (probably novice :)) user

Expected Results:  
File should be saved with read-only bit set (in unix: not writable) so saving program will ask the user a new location (Word won't save files when the readonly bit is set - it will ask the user).

Comment 1

[Jo Hermans]

Similar bug for attachments (in Mail/News and Thunderbird) is bug 220808. There's a browser-specific bug too, but I can't find it (bug 280419 is already expired).

Note that when the browser downloads on the desktop (not in /tmp), you normally don't want that the file is removed after the browser closes. In this case, a read-only flag would not be what you want.

Comment 2

[Ria Klaassen (not reading all bugmail)]

Also a very unexperienced user should get the opportunity to learn from a mistake. :) 

Comment 3

[Magnus Melin [:mkmelin]]

Bug 314601 is open now, and has more, well, activity:) Duping...