Firefox and the `you have chosen to open ...' dialogue

[Aigars Mahinovs]

On 2/24/06, Ian Jackson <ian at davenant.greenend.org.uk> wrote:
> Firstly, it is obviously still necessary for users to be able to
> choose to download content rather than immediately opening it.  I
> think that this should still work via the Save As option from the
> context menu, although there are situations (eg, redirects) where this
> isn't so easily available.  So if you regularly answer `download' to
> that dialogue, and can't say `Save As' instead, please let me know
> quoting the URLs involved so that I can see the situation for myself.

That is really very cumbersome decision. See Sourceforge and GMail for
example. Access to files there is done via redirects and it works very
well. There are cases when user would want to download the file to the
filesystem or "download" it into an application. Even for the same
user and the same file this decision could change based on external
factors (do I want to listen to this podcast now or on my commute?). A
lot of people do not even know about right-clicking a link, but they
still differentiate about "Open now" versus "Save for later".

> Secondly, and this will form the bulk of the issues dealt with in this
> mail, it has been suggested that there are security problems with
> removing this dialogue.

While I can see the potential security problems of opening files,
currently it is not the concern people have when making decision
whether to open a link in an application or to save it. Much more
important factors include "Do I have time to view it now, or should I
save it to look at later?" and "Oh, this want to start another
program. I do not to wait until OOO loads. Lets save it instead.".
Automatically launching programs when a user simply clicks a link in
the browser is quite unexpected. When opening documents from
filesystem, one would know what he is opening and expect an
application to be started. However for web it is not true - generally
speaking links for different types of files could be
indistinguishable, so if an clicking an URL produces a different
result then simply opening a page in current window, user must be
warned about that and given some measure of control, because this
clearly is not the default expected action anymore.

--
Best regards,
    Aigars Mahinovs        mailto:aigarius at debian.org
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