361847 - Firefox fails to parse IE-style .url files on non-Windows platforms

Status: NEW

(Core :: Networking: File, defect, P5)

Description

[Chris Lawson (gone)]

Filed on behalf of a user. Problem was first reported here:

http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?p=2619373#2619373

I switched to Camino in September, and on the whole I'm very happy with it. However I do find it annoying that Camino apparently can't read IE Favorite .url files. Firefox seems to share this problem, but Safari and Opera can read IE .url files quite happily. Please note that I am NOT talking about importing Favorites into Bookmarks here; the .url files were backed up off my old Windows NT box, so they're not "live".

This is not a critical problem, because I've discovered a work-around. Here's an example of the contents of a .url file that Camino cannot parse:

[DEFAULT]
BASEURL=http://www.airnav.com/
[InternetShortcut]
URL=http://www.airnav.com/
Modified=A0D771D52C77C30124
IconFile=http://www.airnav.com/favicon.ico
IconIndex=1 


The relevant Camino bug is bug 361838. Possibly related bugs in Firefox and/or Core seem to be bug 107959 and bug 248538. This may be a problem in Firefox 2.0, but I don't have any of these IE-style .url files around to test it with. Presumably, this affects all platforms and operating systems equally, though it was reported against the Mac version of Firefox with IE .url files from an NT system.

Comment 1

[Dave Townsend [:mossop]]

As you say, for firefox this is bug 248538


*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 248538 ***

Comment 2

[Phil Ringnalda (:philor)]

Nope, not that confused bug which was actually about porting some IE profile migration code, though it never quite realized it, and then wandered off into the way the Windows-only code doesn't work quite right. On non-Windows platforms, we just don't do anything with them, treating them as unknown content (which on Mac at least, means that Safari wants them, and is quite capable of handling them).

Comment 3

[Phil Ringnalda (:philor)]

And not bug 107959, which is (or at least began life as, and spent years as) about ancient IE/Mac .url files, with 0 bytes of content and a resource fork, rather than the more straightforward IE/Win text files.

Comment 5

[Robert Strong (they/them - no direct email)]

There is also bug 442930 to provide this functionality across all OS's for the OS specific implementation (e.g. .url, .webloc, .desktop)

Comment 8

[Firefox Bug Husbandry Bot]

Bulk change to priority: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1399258