On May 10, 2007, at 6:50 PM, André Wyrwa wrote: > ... > If i get a mail with a link to a pdf file, firefox opens and presents > me with an empty window directly opening evince to show the document. > > Since Evince can open the pdf from the web directly, it would be much > nicer if Evolution would directly open Evince. > > More generalised: It would be great, if all links to files other than > web pages would directly open the mime-associated application, provided > that they'd be capable of fetching the content (via gnome-vfs)? > ...
That would be nifty, but probably not possible. The flaw in the plan, as you suggested, is that it "would exceed the possibilies of current mime specifications". More precisely, Evolution can't know that it's a PDF, without making an HTTP request for (at least the metadata of) the file. You might be thinking that if the URL ends in ".pdf", Evolution can trust the file to be a PDF, but it can't. For example, <http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:OjBILldOR4sJ: crypto.csail.mit.edu/classes/6.857/papers/secret-shamir.pdf> is an HTML page, not a PDF. I could even email you a redirect to that URL, like so. <http://urlx.org/google.com/0a8e8> Now Evolution would need to make not one, but two HTTP requests just to find out that the file is something that Firefox will need to open after all -- and Firefox would then have to make those HTTP requests all over again, making the overall experience much slower. And even if it *was* a PDF, what if the link was to a site that requires cookie-based logins for downloads? Firefox would be able to handle the login (indeed, if Firefox was your usual browser it probably would have the necessary cookie already), but Evince would not. (That part of the problem would be solved if Gnome programs shared cookies and if you were using a Gnome-based Web browser, but neither of those are true.) So the next best thing is for Firefox, if it opens a new window/tab solely to display a file that ends up being handed off to a helper app, to close that unused browser window/tab immediately. Other browsers do this; if Firefox doesn't, you should report that as a bug. (You may think, "why doesn't Firefox delay opening a new window/tab until it knows that it's downloading a file that it can display itself?" But very early Mozilla versions actually did work that way, and it was horrible. When Web sites were slow in responding, it looked like it was the browser that was slow, or like Mozilla had ignored the mouse click altogether.) Cheers -- Matthew Paul Thomas http://mpt.net.nz/ _______________________________________________ Usability mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/usability
