“Right click and save as” needs to go away

Yet, this required two mouse clicks in the "worst case" that the default selection didn't fit.

I think the best solution is: if no download attribute set and Content-Disposition is not "attachment", then render in the browser. If either condition is met, open a popup with large buttons immediately executing the action: download to default folder, download to temp (which will be deleted upon next browser start), download to specific folder, render in browser (if there's a registered handler plugin for this mimetype). Maybe add a checkbox "Open after download has finished", and maybe also add one "Try multi-stream download" (because many sites still limit single-stream bandwidth). Even more maybe, for video files add a "Preview with VLC" and fetch the required parts (header and final part of video) first, so I can stream and keep the file for later usage.

But anyways, when pages use this already, it OFTEN pisses me off, when I want to look at a PDF in browser, but the web app/page is forcing me to save it to disk and then re-open it in another app.

What we _really_ need, that we _don't_ have a way to do right now -- is signal the browser to _prompt_ the user as to whether it should be saved or displayed in-browser. The browser could ignore unless it was capable of displaying in-browser of course. That's something we do not have any way of doing in a reliable way now with HTTP headers, and I wish html5 would add that, instead of duplicating a lesser feature which is both possible now, and frequently annoying.

The world does not revolve around windows. File extensions are optional, not mandatory, in unix land. If the site says the file is named foobar, its name is foobar not foobar.txt.

The client-side solution sounds nice, but there's still likely a large percentage of your users for whom it won't work.

So instead of just a server-side solution, to do this nicely you have to have BOTH a server-side and client-side solution, for now. How is that good?

I suppose you could leave the default & old browser users to fend for themselves (in a manner of speaking), but sadly the folks who are downloading a different browser are mostly the same folks who understand how to right-click.

The ones that need a simple download link are the ones still using their default browser.