Comment 247 for bug 25830

(In reply to comment #202)
> issues involved were that there was no way to get back to the browser from the
> helper application. How about a different approach? I propose no UI but

Presumably the bit of code *within* firefox that deals with external helpers, since before the user has dismissed the unknown type dialog, the actual external helper can't possibly exist.

> rather only have an option in about:config.
> I am not sure of the correct section but something like:
> browser.display_alltext_as_plain

1) Even for types that look like plain text, I might not want this all the time. Sometimes I really want to view source code with an oddly specific mimetype in firefox with minimal fuss. Sometimes I happen to know the server is going to spew 50MB of ASCII machine logs out and really want it to go directly to the helper rather than wedge the layout engine for a minute.

2) This isn't a text-only issue. Only today I had firefox pop the dialog for a PNG image that was presumably incorrectly tagged. As I've pointed out before, the truly crazy thing is you can select firefox as the external helper and it will dutifully write it out to disk, launch firefox externally on the file, presumably it then uses dbus/DDE/some other equivalent method to pass the file back to the original firefox instance which then displays it just fine. However you've lost the original HTTP session context there: refreshing won't reload and certain other things look/behave differently. The final solution (ignoring any necessity of a dialog for user choice in the matter) should end up behaving exactly as if firefox had known what to do from the beginning.