84913 - Homepage as file on local system doesn't load [need to specify file://]

Status: VERIFIED WORKSFORME

(SeaMonkey :: Preferences, defect)

Description

[Michael T. Babcock]

From Bugzilla Helper:
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux 2.2.19 i686; en-US; rv:0.9.1) Gecko/20010607
BuildID:    2001060713

I've always had a file on my local system as my startup page.  It was
specified as "/home/.../homepage.html" but as of this build, I now have to
specify the "file://" before that.  Is this intentional?  Is there a good reason
not to support local files starting with a slash?

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
N/A

Actual Results:  Blank page

Expected Results:  HTML page

Comment 1

[Matthias Versen [:Matti]]

-> Networking File

Comment 2

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

There is a bug on this already

Comment 3

[timeless]

we have the same issue in commandline apps for linux i think se would know the 
bug...

Comment 4

[sairuh (rarely reading bugmail)]

yep, the cmd-line issue is bug 50131.

confirming --you need to have file:// prepended to /[path] in order to display a
local file as the home page.

Comment 5

[Doug Turner (:dougt)]

sairuh says so

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 50131 ***

Comment 6

[benc]

REOPEN: 
This is a separate entry point, and I think a URL should be required here.

Comment 7

[Doug Turner (:dougt)]

let scott determine this.

Comment 8

[benc]

->prefs

Comment 9

[benc]

I promised to make my case for having different input -> URL processing between
the home page pref and launching from the line command.

Here it is:
the home pref should behave like the location box. People generally are going to
expect the two areas to work consistently. There has been some discussion on
what precisely SHOULD work in location (I for one, have argued that local file
paths should work, internet keywords should be off, etc...) but the main point
here is that there is some consistency that is expected between the two entrypoints.

launching from the line command should give primacy to interpreting as a local
file (in local filesystem syntax), and ONLY support a URL if the URL is explicit
("mozilla http://www.google.com", not "mozilla google"). For example, most users
of shell scripts are not going to want to go hunting for a local file path ->
file: URL converter, for one thing it as non-trivial as it sounds in every OS we
build on. 

Comment 10

[Sven Sandberg]

This also happens under windows ME.

Comment 11

[Dadoo]

Hello everyone in this bug board.

I'm making an encyclopaedic CDROM about freshwater fishes, and I would like to 
distribute a version of Moz that could have the local CDROM index.html as home 
page to start.

Unfortunately, nothing seams to work properly. I have to deal with the fact 
that the current drive letter may change (CDROM UNIT) on every computer, with 
partitionned disk etc...

I tryed almost every combination of slash file: etc... but cannot find a way 
to do this. Even some complicated delphi bat processing wont do a better work.

That's so sorry because the project will be out soon, and I would like to give 
the user the choice at start menu to choose between moz and their current 
browser (often IE).

Thanx if anyone have a suggestion.

Comment 12

[Erik Fabert]

Is this still a problem under Linux? It WFM, Mozilla 1.8a6, WinXP.

Comment 13

[sairuh (rarely reading bugmail)]

tested with 20050126-trunk mozilla bits, and when I set my homepage to
/home/sairuh, it now loads the page as file:///home/sairuh --so marking w4m.

Comment 14

[Michael T. Babcock]

On my Fedora Core 3 (Linux) install with Firefox 1.0 this is no longer a problem
either.

WFM as well.

Comment 15

[benc]

re #11: Dadoo, you probably should look at bug 143021.