Quick summary: currently when you click on a link in mozilla which contains a mime type mozilla doesn't recognise mozilla a) throws up the helper application/save dialog and b) downloads the link in the background. Many people don't like this behaviour and its side effects (salted filenames bug 60203). However other behaviour is problematic since delaying response may cause the server to disconnect. In some cases it may be difficult/expensive to reconnect. I have the following suggestion: (from a networking standpoint this should work; I have no idea if it could be implemented in mozilla) we should accept the connection but throttle it. It should be possible to keep the connection down to say 1KB/s without the server disconnecting (I assume all connections are TCP) since we could be behind a slow link. A simplistic approximation to this is to just eat data gently from the applications socket and hope that this lets the OS accept another packet into its buffer and thus send an ack keeping the connection alive. This may fail if the OS can change the size of its buffer. However I think that compensation can be made for this. (The important thing is to make sure enough acks go back to keep the connection alive.) If the above is possible then the temporary file can be put in Mozilla's disk cache. An enhancement would be to have a pref N such that the first N MB are downloaded fast and from then on we drop back to a slow download. K PS Following the comment at the end of the bug I am posting this here. I hope this is the correct forum.
