Chris Green wrote:
On Wed, Nov 23, 2005 at 07:58:26PM +0000, Ian bell wrote:
Chris Green wrote:
I was just trying to download a file with Firefox (Twiki.tgz from www.twiki.org) and couldn't. All Firefox would do was open the file as if it was HTML and displayed random rubbish in the browser window. Right clicking on the link didn't offer me any useful options either.
IE just asked what I wanted to do and download it.
WOrks fine with Mozilla and Konq.
Maybe it's an oddity of the 1.5 release candidate.
As others have already mentioned, it appears that the issue is the content-type headers sent by either the CGI script or being overridden by the web server.
If you view the Page Info (CTRL-I or Tools -> Page Info in Firefox 1.0.7) you will see it is being told the content is of mime-type "text/plain" - the file you are looking to download appears to be flagged as an inline text file and is being displayed as such by Firefox as per the RFCs and standards. Your average gzipped file (in this case tar-gzipped) would be of mime-type "application/x-gzip".
This would certainly confuse the browser and can quite definately produce the results you can see. I have discovered the same in the past when writing file download scripts such as the one used here. I have had exactly the same effects displayed when the header information is incomplete - I have even once managed to get the reverse effect (firefox would download perfectly and recognise the file from the mime type, but IE wouldn't as it was seeing a .phtml filename and not recognising the file wasn't a web page - I think, however, this was more complicated as I since found some weird headers being passed down in front of the ones generated by my script)
I cannot speak of the lack of "Save target as..." option in the context-menu of the link, as I have not yet moved to 1.5 beta though, and I would say that is something to raise with the Firefox dev teams as I constantly use that functionality.
Just my 2 pence
Jim
p.s. apologies to adam for the previous message - too early on the morning after for me to have noticed!