62253 - Option to force to save an URL explicitly

Status: NEW

(Firefox :: File Handling, enhancement, P3)

Description

[[e-mail]]

When a URL is entered in the Navigation-Bar there should be a new button like
"Save URL". This button shall act like the "save as" in the right-click-menu.

This is needed because some servers are misconfigured and send the mimetype for
instance "text/html" rather than "text/unknown" or something like that.

I've tried to download an XPI, and the browser displayed it in the window. (I
think this was right for the browser.)

Comment 1

[Daniel Veditz [:dveditz]]

This could be a generally useful feature. If a web page provides you a link you 
can use the context menu to do a "save as", but sometimes the link is really to 
some bit of javascript indirection to the URL, or you're interested in 
inspecting an image or script referenced in the URL.

Sometimes you know a URL, but you don't want to look at it right now you just 
want to grab it. Mozilla does not provide a mechanism for doing that. 
Communicator had a "view-source:" protocol type that was useful, for developers 
maybe we could use a "save-as:" hack. But something accessible to users via UI 
would be better.

Comment 2

[timeless]

Would you prefer to be able to ask mozilla to treat the url as some other mime 
type [per url, server, directory, extension, ...]? This way you could browse to 
a .xpi url and tell mozilla to treat it as an xpi which would trigger standard 
xpi functionality instead of requiring interim steps.

Comment 3

[Daniel Veditz [:dveditz]]

No, you want an option to save it. Maybe you don't want to install it, maybe 
you want to inspect it first.  Maybe we're not just talking about .xpi files, 
but also requesting a generic feature that would be useful for other types 
which the browser assumes it knows how to handle (html, js, css, images) that 
you want to save locally for inspection rather than have rendered.

Comment 4

[[e-mail]]

Yes, this is what I meant. A generic option to save a content to a file. I wrote
the XPI only as an sample - no more and no less.

Comment 5

[Asa Dotzler [:asa]]

law or mscott? actually I have no idea who would get this.

Comment 6

[Bill Law]

This should go to xpapps/nav (not mscott).  The tricky thing is the UI that
would enable this.  Would this be German?  I think the owner of the XPApps is a
good place to send it in the short term.

Comment 7

[Asa Dotzler [:asa]]

OK, over to XPApps.

Comment 8

[sairuh (rarely reading bugmail)]

over to vishy to decide who gets this...

Comment 9

[timeless]

hrm, after thinking about this and staring at various things, i think a 
dockable download manager to replace the url bar might be a workable solution.

        [protocol] [server] [port] [path] [filename] [mime type] [target] 
[size]
 <load> [                                          ] |Auto     | |Auto  |

The user enters in a url, which might undergo completion or whatever.
pressing enter triggers load.
Tabbing out of the location field converts it into a collection of editable 
comboboxes (according to the collumn headers), and lands the user in mime type.
The browser then tries to do a HEAD for the url or the equivalent, which 
results in Auto being replaced by the defaults for the url based on the server 
response.

Mime/Type is both editable and drops down into a BeOS like mimetype tree.

Target includes:
Browse [load in the current window or a new window if the download manager is 
not attached to a window]
New Window
Save
TargetList
BookmarkList
-
Targetlist and bookmarklist are magic, they result in trees similar to the mail 
moveto cascading menu [although i'm not sure if i'll use a tree or a menu 
cascade, I suspect a tree. In the future trees and cascading menus might be 
equivalent and controlled by the user if we ever reach UIML]

Targetlist is a hierarchical enumeratation of all _content and iframes [each 
window is a root].

Bookmarklist is a hierarchical enumeration of all folders in the bookmarks.

if the user enters:

ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla/nightly/latest/mozilla-win32-talkback.zip
and presses tab, it becomes:

ftp|ftp.mozilla.org|pub/mozilla/nightly/latest|mozilla-win32-talkback.zip|appli
cation/zip|save|<filesize>
user presses shift-tab four times, and types ht

ht
http /hyper text transfer protocol/

tab 
http|ftp.mozilla.org|pub/mozilla/nightly/latest|mozilla-win32-talkback.zip|appl
ication/zip|save
enter. [size] becomes a progress meter indicating current

Comment 10

[Paul Chen]

nav triage team:

Not something we'll be doing for beta1, marking nsbeta1-

Comment 11

[Paul Chen]

Marking nsbeta1- bugs as future to get off the radar.

Comment 12

[Jesse Ruderman]

Another way to fix this bug would be to fix bug 67178, "[rfe] 'download file' 
option in Open Web Location dialog."  mpt didn't like that idea though.

Comment 13

[sairuh (rarely reading bugmail)]

over to file handling.

Comment 14

[Jesse Ruderman]

Another way: bug 97123, shift+enter in url bar to save.

Comment 15

[OstGote!]

*** Bug 171636 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 16

[Ihar 'Philips' Filipau]

*** Bug 326649 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 17

[Ihar 'Philips' Filipau]

All of the products covered have Download Manager. So from my POV that would be logical addition to Download Manager - rather than over(re)loading location bar with another shortcut.

Another way to implement would be a drag'n'drop of plain text. If DM can catch the text and look for URLs inside - that would be good option too. I would prefer additional dialog called upon "Add" button - but with drag'n'drop one can drop more that single URL too.

The question really is: can download manager look into text it got?