Comment 1 for bug 252902

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.