My personal paper cut [LWN.net]

My personal paper cut

Posted Jul 23, 2009 17:58 UTC (Thu) by Baylink (subscriber, #755)
In reply to: My personal paper cut by jimparis
Parent article: Fighting small bugs

The problem is "scroll down to GSM file".

I *very often* (nearly always) *do not have* GSM file in that list, on a fresh install of Firefox. And if the type of file you have isn't in the list and you aren't presented with the "open with" option, then you're screwed.

I know that's not supposed to happen, but it does, and not infrequently.

Additionally, the dialog of which you speak -- and this complaint is closer in spirit to the sort of thing they're actually looking for --

1) has 2 columns, with an immovable divider
2) cannot be resized
3) lists the human readable name of the filetype (which is almost always useless) followed by the mimetype (which is very often useless, and is often clipped off partially or completely because of 1 and 2) and does not show the only thing you can actually see -- the file extension -- at all.

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My personal paper cut

Posted Jul 23, 2009 18:10 UTC (Thu) by jimparis (subscriber, #38647) [Link]

I also did not have "GSM file" on that list, until I clicked one for the first time. And the behavior of clicking on a file (that is not on that list) is to pop up that dialog box where you pick an application, in my experience.

So your problem is that nothing at all happens -- you click the file and it behaves as if you didn't click the file?

Which means we're back to my previous questions -- do you have something like mozplugger installed (check about:plugins), or do you have an action defined in one of the mailcap files (grep gsm /etc/mailcap ~/.mailcap)?

(Are you actually interested in fixing this or just complaining about it? I'm trying to help but you're really not giving enough information for me to provide any useful advice).

My personal paper cut

Posted Jul 30, 2009 15:22 UTC (Thu) by nye (guest, #51576) [Link]

My 'solution' is, whenever Firefox pops up a dialogue asking how to open a file, to choose '/usr/bin/xdg-open'. This allows me to use whatever file handler I define in my DE, neatly bypassing Firefox's hilariously bad 'open with' system.

My personal paper cut

Posted Jul 30, 2009 16:27 UTC (Thu) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link]

haha, this is brilliant! And obvious -- in all these years of pain (papercut-quality pain) I'm surprised I didn't think of this.

Good call nye.