362891 - Download manager should not appear when you choose "Open with" on small files

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Toolkit :: Downloads API, enhancement)

Description

[Jason Spiro]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.0.6) Gecko/20060728 Firefox/1.5.0.6
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.0.6) Gecko/20060728 Firefox/1.5.0.6

My request:

When I click a link to a small file, like a Word document, and choose to open (not save) it, IMO the download manager should not appear onscreen.  (There is no reason why the I would need the download manager:  the file opens right away, so I don't need to click the "Open" button.)

Note:

I would suggest you fix this by setting browser.download.manager.openDelay to some nonzero value by default: maybe 250 or 500 milliseconds or so.  The problem is, that pref affects not just "Open", but also "Save to Disk", so I suspect people would complain if you tried such a fix.

Reproducible: Always

Comment 1

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

you can disable the opening of download manager when starting a new download and open it when you need it from Tools menu or CTRL+J

If you don't show the download manager on Open and a user tries to open a large file, they will not know that dm is downloading their file to open, and will ask why it is not opening

And you cannot know the size of a file on a certain number of servers until finished downloading

Comment 2

[Jason Spiro]

(In reply to comment #1)
> you can disable the opening of download manager when starting a new download
> and open it when you need it from Tools menu or CTRL+J

I know.  But I want the DM when downloading large files.  I don't want it when opening small files.

> If you don't show the download manager on Open and a user tries to open a large
> file, they will not know that dm is downloading their file to open, and will
> ask why it is not opening

That is why I wrote "on small files" in the bug summary.  :)

> And you cannot know the size of a file on a certain number of servers until
> finished downloading

You could safely assume all files on such servers are large.

Since I have answered all your objections, I am taking the liberty of reopening this RFE.  I hope you don't mind.

Idea:  Why not just set browser.download.manager.openDelay to 500 in the next Firefox alpha release then run a poll at mozillazine.org to see if people prefer the new or the old value?

Comment 3

[Shawn Wilsher :sdwilsh]

That preference was removed because people were filing bugs wondering why the download manager wasn't opening.