479323 - support for .bz2 compressed files

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 173044

(Firefox :: File Handling, enhancement)

Description

[Louis Kruger]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.0.5) Gecko/2009010511 Gentoo Firefox/3.0.5
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.0.5) Gecko/2009010511 Gentoo Firefox/3.0.5

bzip2 has become a compression format with nearly as much support and common use as gzip, but with a significantly higher compression ratio.  High compression ratios save bandwidth costs which benefits everybody.

If I visit a URL protocol://foo.bar/document.html.bz2, I would like Firefox to transparently decompress the file and display the HTML, just as it does currently for gzip.
It seems like there would be a few pieces to this:
1) Allow "bzip2" in the Accept-Encoding: header and recognize the equivalent response from the server.
2) Recognize a something/x-bzip2 mime-type or something along those lines
3) Recognize the .bz2 extension, especially for protocols such as file:/ where there are no headers and metadata.

Of the above, 1) and 2) might be more involved since they involve headers and mime types and may need coordination with server vendors or standards committees.  However #3 could be implemented in Firefox and be immediately useful without bothering anyone else to support it.  #3 alone would still be very useful.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
Visit any text or HTML URL that ends in .bz2
You probably already have one on your local disk that you could access with a file:// URL
Actual Results:  
Vising a *.html.bz2 URL either opens a download popup, or displays compressed binary garbage.

Expected Results:  
Would like to see the contents of *.html (or *.txt, or any other displayable file format) after bzip2 decompression

Comment 1

[Mardeg]

3) hasn't even happened for gzipped files yet, see bug 52282 filed in September 2000