92192 - [RFE] file:// should open/view compressed files like .gz

Status: VERIFIED DUPLICATE of bug 52282

(Core :: Networking: File, enhancement)

Description

[Seth Delackner]

From Bugzilla Helper:
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:0.9.2) Gecko/20010628
BuildID:    2001062823

Although http requests automatically decode and display html.gz files, File ->
Open and file:// both ask which helper application to use.


Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1. Enter a location of "file:///foo.html.gz"
2. Repeat with http://www.gnu.org/manual/gdb-4.17/html_mono/gdb.html.gz


Actual Results:  The local file does not decompress and display.
The http'd file DOES decompress and display.

Expected Results:  The behavior should be identical: on the fly decompression
and display.

Comment 1

[Christopher Aillon (sabbatical, not receiving bugmail)]

The reason for this is that on servers that do this, they are sending back a
header of either "Content-Encoding: gzip" or "Content-Encoding: x-gzip" along
with a Content-Type: "text/html" or something so that the browser knows that it
is a zip/gzipped html doc in this isntance.

Obviously your local file system does not send back headers so the browser
cannot know this.  This is the correct behaviour, so I'm marking this as Invalid.

Comment 2

[benc]

I thought we did some extension->file type mapping w/ file URLs...

Comment 3

[Christopher Aillon (sabbatical, not receiving bugmail)]

There are some bugs related to the empty content type being auto-detected (see
bug 57884, bug 64703, bug 89045)  But .gz files don't have to contain a single
HTML file.  They can be multiple .html files, a tar archive, or really anything
else that you can store on disk.

It might be a nice RFE to detect what the contents of the .gz file is (not sure
of the difficulty here, presumably not too difficult thoguh), and if it is only
one file try to determine the content type based on that.  

Comment 4

[Christopher Aillon (sabbatical, not receiving bugmail)]

Also see bug 35956 - "File extension not changed but gzipped files expanded when
saving"

Comment 5

[benc]

changed to RFE.

Comment 6

[benc]

RESOLVED/DUPE:
found it in the big file: bug cleanup.

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 52282 ***

Comment 7

[benc]

VERIFIED:
file: URL verification cleanup.