I collect and grade lab reports electronically, and both classes I’m teaching this term had labs due yesterday. I’ve also agreed to be on a faculty committee to evaluate proposals for a fellowship program, and they had a preliminary application deadline yesterday or today. As a result, I’m spending a lot of time downloading Word files from GMail.
Every time I click on the download link, Firefox pops up a little dialogue box asking me if I’d like to open the file with Word, or Save it to disk. It also includes a helpful little checkbox saying “Do this automatically for files like this from now on.” Like an idiot, I check it off before I hit “Save.”
Every. Goddamn. Time. Despite the fact that it manifestly does nothing, I check it off, in the hopes that this time it’ll take. On one of the computers I use regularly, it’s started to pop up already checked, which at least saves me that half-second of futility. It still doesn’t do anything, mind, but at least I don’t need to actively click something for it to ignore.
This is only the most immediately annoying of the “Door Close” dialog boxes that pop up (the name comes from Kate’s observation that they’re like the “Door Close” buttons in elevators, that don’t actually do anything when you press them). I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve tried to set the AutoPlay settings on my various computers, to no avail. I always get asked what action I would like the system to perform, despite the fact that every possible combination of file types is already set to “Open Folder to View Files.” And after my recent complaint about my tablet failing to “Sleep” properly when plugged into the power brick, I double-checked the settings, and confirmed that in every place I could find an option for “Hibernate,” it was set to “Never.” Did it make any difference?
Well, to be fair, the “door close” button in the elevator in our building does do something, but only if you have the foresight to press it right away instead of waiting until you are thinking, “gee, the elevator doors have been open for an awfully long time.” Granted, that’s generally the only time one *does* think of pressing it, but still. It does function, it’s just that its function is not useful.
There is a heated argument going on about this issue over on the Mozilla bug form (see here).
If it’s any comfort, that problem with Firefox is just the same in the Mac version.
Another pet gripe with Firefox is that after a crash (Firefox or the computer), a shutdown while upgrading Firefox, or a power failure, it gives you the option of restoring the previous browsing session. But if you just shut it down normally (like when updating system software), there’s no option to restore the previous session.
I also checked that little box about a dozen or so times before I realized this issue. But I just had a thought: are we misinterpreting what the box is supposed to do? The dialog always comes up, and there are two options: open and save. But the option which is preselected when the dialog opens(and is then simply performed by hitting the enter key) is perhaps what is set by checking the box. Like comment #1 says, it may be working but not really useful.
As far as I can tell, there are two things going on here. I couldn’t be bothered to completely figure this out, but it bugs me too, so here’s what I found:
The first issue is an RFC that specifies that browsers shouldn’t let users directly launch executable files, which means that you can’t permit users to select a default action which would autolaunch an executable file. Since Word permits macros, I guess it is considered an executable file.
The fix posted here:
http://www.keepaustincorporate.com/2007/02/firefox_changes_open_dialog_be.phtml
should take care of that problem, although the line at 385 should just read “if (false) {“.
If you install this fix and try opening a Word file from most places it should autolaunch as you’d like.
The second issue is that Gmail is doing something funky with how they serve up the attachment, because you’ll continue to get the dialog box when downloading from Gmail regardless of the above fix. It may simply be that Gmail sends a MIME type of “application/octet-stream” and the link Gmail provides doesn’t end in “.doc” so the browser cannot recognize that this is a Word file. I’m not sure.
#5, Dr. Pain:
From my reading of it (Like an idiot, I check it off before I hit “Save.”), Chad doesn’t want it to autolaunch, he wants it to Save, without having to say so.
Chad:
How about setting up a mail client to download your GMail to your computer via SMTP or IMAP? Would that help? Just a thought.
It would have been clearer to say “it will automatically take whatever action you’ve selected.” I don’t think it makes any difference whether that is Save or Open. Basically it makes the checkbox he’s bitching about work (except on Google).
I haven’t tested this in gmail, but it should work.
1. Install the Firefox extension called DownThemAll. It’s a rich, robust, very fast download manager. I highly recommend it.
2. Set up your default download directory in DownThemAll.
3. Right-click the attachment link and choose dTaOneClick.
4. When the download is complete, close the DownThemAll progress window.
With the exception of some file-sharing sites (e.g., RapidShare), you should never again have to use Save Link As or see that “what do you want to do with this file” dialog box.
HP
I haven’t investigated in detail, but I ran into a similar, but reverse problem lately. A user I support wants to always open pdf documents, NEVER download (complicated reason, but makes sense to me). We set the Firefox behavior so, but one site always offers the download dialogue. Check box doesn’t turn off behavior. It turns out the web page in question includes the “Download=yes” option in the link, which forces the dialogue, no matter user preferences. I can’t find a configuration setting that overrides this. Does standard HTML call for this behavior? If so, I suppose we are stuck. At least you should get a different dialogue without the meaningless check box. This is the one case I know where IE has better behavior than FF. The dialogue it opens doesn’t have the useless checkbox.
Yes, it’s deeply stupid. My own fix , devised for PDFs, which I routinely want to read _and_ save, is to have shell script called apphelper. You set it as the app for the file type and say “always use it”, and it fires up the viewer, then offers to save it fr you afterwards. Don’t want to read it now? Quit the viewer immediately. Then save.
Cumbersome to some perhaps, but solves the problem for me (and avoids the “save as” dialogue, which I loathe).