880306 - Mime type handling is case sensitive (when opening files)? application/pdf opens in PDF Viewer, but application/PDF downloads.

Status: REOPENED

(Firefox :: File Handling, defect)

Description

[David Tonhofer]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:21.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/21.0 (Beta/Release)
Build ID: 20130516103852

Steps to reproduce:

Turns out the way Firefox handles the mime type string depends on its casing?

This should not be the case I reckon:

http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc1341/4_Content-Type.html

" Note also that a subtype specification is MANDATORY. There are no default subtypes. The type, subtype, and parameter names are not case sensitive. For example, TEXT, Text, and TeXt are all equivalent. Parameter values are normally case sensitive, but certain parameters are interpreted to be case- insensitive, depending on the intended use. (For example, multipart boundaries are case-sensitive, but the "access- type" for message/External-body is not case-sensitive.)"

So, why do I think mime type handling is case sensitive....

1) I had to install Adobe Reader to be able to read a customer's PDF with "comments" in it that could not be read in okular.
2) Big mistake! Adobe Reader behaves like a facehugger, burrows in everywhere. This is nasty because it doesn't seem to display fonts correctly and is dog to start up.
3) Try to remove it.
4) For firefox, this mean going into ~/.firefox and manually dumping the shared object file.
5) All seem well, PDFs seems to opened in Firefox PDF reader (pdf.js) or okular again, which is nice as the fonts are back to normal now. 
6) Presently, trying to open a PDF document on a EU website (http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-12-1389_en.htm ... the PDF is at http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-12-1389_en.pdf)
7) Adobe reader starts up.
8) Flashback experience, Bad trip etc.
9) Look into that. WHy the difference?
10) Download a random pdf from arxiv (that gets opened in pdf.js) using "wget" (note that you need to set the user agent string for some reason):

get --user-agent="Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.8; rv:24.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/24.0" http://arxiv.org/pdf/1306.0898v1
----> Length: 432082 (422K) [application/pdf]

11) Download the EU pdf using wget:

wget --inet4-only http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-12-1389_en.pdf

---> Length: unspecified [application/PDF]

12) Ok, the EU guys are a bit unonfigured, but "application/PDF" SHOULD lead to the same behaviour as "application/pdf". Right?

Comment 1

[Drew Willcoxon :adw]

(In reply to David Tonhofer from comment #0)
> 3) Try to remove it.
> 4) For firefox, this mean going into ~/.firefox and manually dumping the
> shared object file.

Why'd you do that and how did that help?  All you should need to do is open Firefox's Preferences, go to the Applications tab, search for PDF, and choose the behavior you want.  Does that not work?

Comment 2

[[:Aleksej]]

Is this page about two different issues?  The summary seems to concern only steps 11-12?

Comment 3

[David Tonhofer]

This is correct. One issue: case-sensitive mime handling. The Adobe Reader problem is irrelevant here.

Comment 4

[[:Aleksej]]

Thanks.  It blocks, or is duplicate of, bug 59619.

Comment 6

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

Uh...  This is a bug about a specific issue.  How can it possibly be a duplicate of a tracking metabug that's tracking such specific bugs?

This bug just needs to be debugged, then fixed.

Comment 7

[[:Aleksej]]

Reproduced with 2015-03-30-03-02-03-mozilla-central-firefox-39.0a1.ru.linux-x86_64.