Closed Bug 323300 Opened 19 years ago Closed 18 years ago

Wrong "open with..." default info when double-clicking attachments

Categories

(Thunderbird :: Mail Window Front End, defect)

x86
Windows XP
defect
Not set
normal

Tracking

(Not tracked)

RESOLVED WORKSFORME

People

(Reporter: Andreas_Kleinert, Assigned: mscott)

References

Details

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; de; rv:1.8) Gecko/20051111 Firefox/1.5
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; de; rv:1.8) Gecko/20051111 Firefox/1.5

When any kind of attachment is tried to be shown, e.g. by doubleclick or by using the "open..." context menu entry from the right mouse button, the information on the displayed standard application very often is wrong.

For example if you installed IrfanView and configured it to be the default application for files with .gif extension, Thunderbird will still show the setup that it found during its first installation (regardless of any Thunderbird updates in the meantime). For Windows XP this might be the standard Windows Image and Fax display tool

The funny aspect is, that this information is shown along with the icon of the new setting, i.e. the displayed symbol will be the one from IrfanView. Only the information text is wrong.

This turns out to be annoying when you e.g. try to switch from OpenOffice as .ppt viewer to the standalone PowerPoint viewer from Microsoft - you'll never notice the change unless you try regardless of what is displayed.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
see above

Actual Results:  
see above

Expected Results:  
see above

see above
The reason this happens is that TB first looks up the attachment's MIME type; 
it relies on the extension only if the MIME lookup fails.  
xref bug 293804 comment 1.

I'm guessing that Irfanview hasn't made any changes the MIME portion of the registry (e.g. HKCR\MIME\Database\Content-type\image/gif ) and so that key is pointing to the old handler.  You should verify that that key has a string 
value named "Extension" with a value of ".gif".  Generally, no other values or subkeys should be present for simple filetypes like this.

For the icon issue, see bug 243838.
No response from reporter; => WFM
Status: UNCONFIRMED → RESOLVED
Closed: 18 years ago
Resolution: --- → WORKSFORME
As I mentioned, the problem is not specific to Irfanview. It even occurs with plain .txt files and the Windows editor (where I use Scite as editor).

As a user I simply don't want to check this stuff in the registry, especially not if it works everywhere, except Thunderbird.
Version: unspecified → 1.5
*** Bug 352279 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
(In reply to comment #3)
> As a user I simply don't want to check this stuff in the registry, especially
> not if it works everywhere, except Thunderbird.

You don't have to hack this registry; you can go to 
  Tools | Options | Attachments | View Actions
and change the program used for images (or whatever type) from there.

For the initialization of the 'default' program, tho, TB uses the MIME part of the registry, and barring some fairly major rethinking of the issue, it will continue to do so.  Determining file type by extension is not considered reliable, nor cross-platform, and TB is a multi-platform program.
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