378971 - Use system default ftp handler, where present

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Firefox :: File Handling, enhancement, P3)

Description

[Doug Grinbergs]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X; en-US; rv:1.8.1.3) Gecko/20070309 Firefox/2.0.0.3
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X; en-US; rv:1.8.1.3) Gecko/20070309 Firefox/2.0.0.3

Assumed: an FTP client, e.g. Fetch, is preferred FTP app
Helpful: More Internet to set/check helper settings
Test URL: website with FTP link(s), e.g. http://www.ftpproxy.org/

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1 Launch app
2 Open test URL
3 Click download FTP link
Actual Results:  
Opens in Firefox instead of specified FTP client

Expected Results:  
Opens in specified FTP client

First noticed in 1.5.0.4

Comment 1

[Doug Grinbergs]

Test system: 10.4.9 8P2137, iMac Intel Core Duo/1.83G

Comment 2

[Doug Grinbergs]

FWIW, a URL that has a ton of FTP URL links:
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/mirrors-ftp.html#HANDBOOK-MIRRORS-CHAPTER-SGML-MIRRORS-LV-FTP

Comment 3

[Samuel Sidler (old account; do not CC)]

See the Camino bug for this, bug 308758.

Mozilla browsers have never done that and I'm pretty sure this is a dupe of an existing WF bug which I can't find right now...

Comment 4

[Stephanie Daugherty [:sdaugherty]]

-Unable to find a dupe after extensive searching...
-Removing dupeme, changing component, and confirming as a feature request.
-Would this be able to be handled by an extension?

Comment 5

[Samuel Sidler (old account; do not CC)]

Weird that there's not a dupe. Also see bug 308758 which is Camino-specific.

Comment 6

[Shawn Wilsher :sdwilsh]

Bug 377782?

Comment 7

[Samuel Sidler (old account; do not CC)]

This bug is different in that typically Mozilla has always handled ftp:// URIs. Even if the content handling UI is simplified, a conscious decision would have to be made to allow FTP links to be handed off to the default system app.

Comment 8

[Dan Mosedale (:dmosedale, :dmose)]

It would be interesting to know whether other browsers (especially Safari in both Tiger & pre-release Leopard) typically hand off FTP URIs.

Comment 9

[Samuel Sidler (old account; do not CC)]

(In reply to comment #8)
> It would be interesting to know whether other browsers (especially Safari in
> both Tiger & pre-release Leopard) typically hand off FTP URIs.

Safari hands of FTP links to the default OS handler on both 10.4 and 10.5 beta.

Comment 10

[Doug Grinbergs]

Still busted: 3.0rc3, 10.5.3 9D34, iMac Core Duo/1.83G
Safari 3.1.1 passes the FTP URL to Fetch

Comment 11

[Mike Connor [:mconnor]]

Ironically, since I don't have an ftp client configured on this Mac, Safari opens ftp links in Firefox.

Still, we should probably figure this out.  How is this configured on Mac?

Comment 12

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

Note: the shell integration component consists of bugs for Firefox's integration with the shell. This bug is about how we handle urls so it is misfiled and won't be fixed in
http://mxr.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/source/browser/components/shell/

Not sure if file handling is the right component but it is definitely closer than shell integration so moving.

Comment 13

[Greg]

Oddly enough it turns out that it's a good thing this bug hasn't been fixed because it helps protect users from a potential remote-code-exploit:

https://www.taoeffect.com/blog/2016/01/sky-not-falling-sparklegate-not-as-bad-as-it-could-be/

Comment 14

[Valentin Gosu [:valentin] (he/him)]

FTP support has been removed, so we will now delegate to the OS FTP handler.

(In reply to Greg from comment #13)

Oddly enough it turns out that it's a good thing this bug hasn't been fixed
because it helps protect users from a potential remote-code-exploit:

https://www.taoeffect.com/blog/2016/01/sky-not-falling-sparklegate-not-as-
bad-as-it-could-be/

Hopefully things are better on OSX by now 🙂