Correct URL not opened when special characters are in the address

[DavidGN]

Steps to reproduce:

1. open http://ubuntuforums.org/forumdisplay.php?f=346 in Firefox
2. drag icon from address bar to desktop
3. open URL shortcut
4. the resulting page will be a '404' page not found

[Dariusz Suchojad (dsuch)]

Hello,

I can reproduce the bug but it's clearly not caused by Firefox as I can also
see it when using Seamonkey as the default application for handling text/html
MIME type.

The desktop link stores the correct URL (as seen after
Alt-Enter -> Link -> URL) and its MIME type also gets recognized correctly
(Alt-Enter -> Basic -> MIME type is "text/html").

As defined in /usr/share/applications/defaults.list the text/html shortcuts are
by default handled by Firefox ("text/html" entry points to "firefox.desktop").

When you open /usr/share/applications/firefox.desktop you will see that the
"Exec" key points to "firefox %u" which, according to
http://standards.freedesktop.org/desktop-entry-spec/latest/ar01s06.html,
means that Firefox will be passed a single URL, which one would assume to be
the original URL but apparently Nautilus (or one of the libraries it uses,
GNOME GIO?) chops the URL's query string part off before passing it to Firefox,
so in the end the browser opens http://ubuntuforums.org/forumdisplay.php which
isn't actually a 404 but also not the page one would expect.

The interesting question is, what's happening after the user double-clicks a desktop
icon, where's that event's handler and how does it read the link's URL?
I'm not a Nautilus/GNOME developer and I couldn't figure it out after having
a glance at its source code & docs.

I don't know how's that related to the bug but gnome-vfs had some issues with
query strings in past
http://svn.gnome.org/viewvc/rhythmbox/trunk/podcast/rb-podcast-manager.c?annotate=4751
(line 595), perhaps they got propagated into GIO? :-)

It's all Ubuntu 8.04, Nautilus 2.22.3.

PS. Not sure what the correct package for this bug report is, I'm leaving it
      as is, but it sure isn't limited to, or caused by, firefox-3.0.

[Dariusz Suchojad (dsuch)]

Confirmed with Ubuntu 8.04, Nautilus 2.22.3

[DavidGN (davidgn)]

Yeah, I didn't think it was just FF3 - someone else updated the bug report with that. Thanks for confirming and the extra info.

[Dariusz Suchojad (dsuch)]

 I'm changing it to "nautilus" then.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Thanks for your bug report. This bug has been reported to the developers of the software. You can track it and make comments here: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=548641

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

the bug has been fixed upstream now and the change will be in jaunty

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

This bug was fixed in the package nautilus - 1:2.26.0-0ubuntu6

---------------
nautilus (1:2.26.0-0ubuntu6) jaunty; urgency=low

  * debian/patches/90_svn_update.patch:
    - update code to current svn to fix some issues, give some testing to the
      changes and make the 2.26.1 update easier
    - don't regenerate thumbnails every time on some zoom level (lp: #204434)
    - query crasher fix (lp: #341988)
    - don't freeze on some compact view geometries (lp: #350909)
    - dnd in list view should work better (lp: #185387)
    - correctly handle special chars in launchers (lp: #233913, #252902)
    - open dialogs on the correct screen (lp: #282806)

 -- Sebastien Bacher <email address hidden> Wed, 01 Apr 2009 22:53:08 +0200