421094 - Setting Firefox as its helper application will spawn 1000000 windows

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 218257

(Firefox :: File Handling, defect)

Description

[Flaky Jake]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8.1.12) Gecko/20080201 Firefox/2.0.0.12
Build Identifier: 

You click on a link which points to a file Firefox doesn't handle natively and prompts you for a helper application to open the file. You (for some inexplicable reason) select Firefox as the helper app. You're faced with a mess of windows. I think this is a bug and should be handled somehow.

Live from the scene http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?p=3282018



Reproducible: Always

Comment 1

[Jeffery Martin]

There is a very good reason to perform this action.

I want Firefox to display the file as plain text in a new tab.

For example, on Windows I like to view Unix shell scripts in a Firefox tab.  I would like to do this without saving the file locally first, and then opening the file manually.  I thought that telling Firefox to use itself to open files with the ".sh" extension would perform this behavior.

Comment 3

[Flaky Jake]

Jeff, for that you'll need this extension "Force content type". https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3207

Sorry for the spam matti and thanks for CC'ing me on the new bug.

Comment 4

[Jeffery Martin]

Thanks for the tip.

By the by, I appreciate the reentrant nature of Firefox in this instance, the behavior is merely nonintuitive for a majority users.