December 20, 2008

Curious, George: Why does Firefox hate jpgs? Usually if there's a link to a jpg image, Firefox just opens it in a tab for me. But periodically, only for some specific jpgs, it prompts me whether I want to save the image or choose a specific program. Only some images, not all. This happens both in FF 3.0 in XP, and in FF 3.1 beta on OSX. What the hell, man?
posted by middleclasstool 16 years ago
  • This is usually due to the server giving the wrong or no MIME type.
  • I have noticed this as well, but not just with Firefox. It is consistent with links to images on Google's Blogger service. Any links to images on blogger are downloaded instead of opened in the browser. It happens with Safari on Mac OS X as well. I haven't dug into it, but I think nil is correct about an incorrect MIME type set by the server.
  • I've been curious about that also. Thank you nil. I appreciate your quick response, but I haven't a clue what you just said.
  • Some info here in the mozilla knowledge base.
  • I agree that it was probably the MIME type. A while ago at work (I'm a web developer) I needed to make a PDF link prompt for saving instead of opening in the browser, and I believe this was accomplished by altering the content type in the HTTP response header.
  • I have this happen sometimes, but with Chrome, not FF.
  • Sorry for being so terse.. I was posting in T9, heh. =) This FF plugin might come in handy.