738606 - Clicking on links to large files in 'show source' freezes FF till the whole linked file is loaded

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 562015

(Firefox :: Untriaged, defect)

Description

[Eric Brown]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:11.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/11.0
Build ID: 20120312181643

Steps to reproduce:

Watched the source code of a page, linking to a large file. I clicked on the link (in the source code) of the large file.

The link(s) was leading to binary data (tar.gz, swf, etc).


Actual results:

Some of that large file's content was immediately loaded and displayed, the first KB or so. But from there, the whole FF application freezed until the full file was loaded. Imagine this with a large file! Unknowingly or accidently clicking on a link leading to a 200MB or larger file. It has happened to me, and I had to kill FF.

The link(s) was leading to binary data (tar.gz, swf, etc).


Expected results:

Only the source code window should have freezed letting the rest of the application work on it's own. That's a bad solution if ad hoc of course, but a greater solution for FF overall.

The file should have been displayed progressively, letting the window process do it's OS communication. Chanses are that that's actually the case (I havent looked at the source code), that some parser is looking for some specific kind of "markers" in the downloaded data (new lines, end tags, or something) and progressively presents (and also does some window processing meanwhile) the downloaded data when those markers are encountered. But binary data can lack those markers, forcing the whole FF application to wait forever for a response from the download process of that large file.