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“Right click and save as” needs to go away

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Re: “Right click and save as” needs to go away

#81

Post by Sprint »

mschuster91 wrote: post #63
tripzilch wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't other browsers have a "temporary downloads" folder? For when you select "open this file with (...)" in the download dialog? Opera does. Now I finally sort of understand why people like opening PDFs in browser plugins, I suppose ... > I usually end up with a clusterfuck of a download directory (mine has 20 GB already in half a year, most of it is one-off downloads!) yeah well but that is your own fault for savin…

Windows does not have a /tmp, and Chrome doesn't offer an easy(!) way to switch download locations per download.

Of course Windows does, $TEMP!

Re: “Right click and save as” needs to go away

#82

Post by sspiff »

TillE wrote: post #46
raverbashing wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is funny, because I absolutely loathe opening in the browser, I prefer saving it. Chrome and FF PDF viewers are better, but with Acrobat it was a bag of hurt. Also, see: saving is the more generic answer. Save and you can see it, open it and before the Chrome 'save' button you had to re-download it.

On Windows I've yet to see any PDF viewer that's faster or better than Sumatra. All the in-browser ones are a bit slow and lacking in features.

I've been using Sumatra for a long time, but it's been supplanted by Firefox in most cases recently. Sumatra is great and lightweight though, and it uses a robust and open source rendering and parsing engine.

Re: “Right click and save as” needs to go away

#83

Post by camus »

chrisfarms wrote: post #18

One small nitpick: please please don't make all your files download with a single filename. In the article it gives an example of "fixing" a hideous generated filename like "203759-fs3.pdf" to download as "invoice.pdf". Yes this is a little nicer, but please be _even_ nicer and put other relevant info in the filename, "invoice-2013-01-01.pdf" is infinitely more useful to me. Context: My bank forces statement download…

that's definetly a very good idea. Customize your filenames with a relevant name , adding the date is a very good practice, and why not the user/customer name too ( for invoices,etc ... ).

Re: “Right click and save as” needs to go away

#84

Post by marcosdumay »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #13

There are already ways to force browsers to download using HTTP headers. The author says this is a "server-side solutions to front-end problem", okay. 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…

Isn't that exactly what browsers ask you when you click in "Save as"? Ok, it's not "display in browser", it's just "display" (or "open"), but what's the difference?

Re: “Right click and save as” needs to go away

#85

Post by marcosdumay »

GhotiFish wrote: post #30
GavinB wrote: post #8

For everyone complaining that they don't want to be forced to download--just have two buttons: March Invoice: View - Download This is much clearer for the average user than a single link with hidden right click functionality. Currently clicking on a link you have no idea what you're going to get.

so would the browser be enforcing that? Or the server? Because both options are unacceptable.

The browser is enforcing that, unless you tell it not to, like you always can with a browser.

At least it's not Javascript.

Re: “Right click and save as” needs to go away

#86

Post by stan_rogers »

mchanson wrote: post #48

Who was still using 'Right click and save as'?

I certainly do -- I almost always want to change the file name to something that makes sense at my end. I don't often care what makes sense at the creator's end; I want to find the file quickly when I need it.

Re: “Right click and save as” needs to go away

#87

Post by cfj »

Terretta wrote: post #64

> There are or course other ways of forcing file downloads, such as adding certain configuration to your .htaccess file, but I think server-side solutions to front-end problems should be avoided whenever possible. I'd disagree with this being a "Front End" problem. You, serving the file, presumably have an idea what you want the user to do with the file. The .html page you propose editing is server side. The file bei…

I must admit my knowledge of content headers is lacking. Thanks for sharing your list.

Re: “Right click and save as” needs to go away

#88

Post by d0mine »

jcampbell1 wrote: post #73
jrochkind1 wrote: post #13

There are already ways to force browsers to download using HTTP headers. The author says this is a "server-side solutions to front-end problem", okay. 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…

Content-Disposition attachement is one of the hardest things to implement when you have UTF-8 filenames. You have to browser sniff, and even then I have haven't found a good solution. Does anyone know of a good resource that explains all the edge cases that must be handled?

Here's some browser testing http://greenbytes.de/tech/tc2231/

The link is from http://stackoverflow.com/questions/93551/how-to-encode-the-f...

Re: “Right click and save as” needs to go away

#89

Post by kijin »

jcampbell1 wrote: post #73
jrochkind1 wrote: post #13

There are already ways to force browsers to download using HTTP headers. The author says this is a "server-side solutions to front-end problem", okay. 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…

Content-Disposition attachement is one of the hardest things to implement when you have UTF-8 filenames. You have to browser sniff, and even then I have haven't found a good solution. Does anyone know of a good resource that explains all the edge cases that must be handled?

See [1] for a very comprehensive and up-to-date table of browser support for various encoding schemes. See [2] for browser-specific hacks.

Summary: most modern browsers including IE9 support RFC2231/5987. (Edit: see my other comment in this thread for IE6-8.)

Another option is to leave out the troublesome "filename" parameter altogether and use the last part of the URL to convey the same information, e.g. /files/uploads/2013//filename.ext. After all, most browsers already understand how percent-encoding works in the URL. With today's URL rewriting engines, this shouldn't be too difficult to achieve regardless of how your files are actually organized on disk or which language you use to perform access control. It would be as if the client were requesting a static file.

[1] http://greenbytes.de/tech/tc2231/

[2] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7967079/special-character...

Re: “Right click and save as” needs to go away

#90

Post by marcosdumay »

mbesto wrote: post #21

QWERTY keyboards need to go away, but they are design patterns that people are used to. Any file the browser would normally try to display natively or through a plugin can be forced to download using this attribute. What if you want to do the opposite? Are we going to have to do "Right+click and Open in Browser"? What about mobile? Also, as far as I'm aware this issue is only really with PDF files, as virtually every…

> Also, as far as I'm aware this issue is only really with PDF files, as virtually every other MIME extension is not supported by a browser.

It's worse with XML files, source code and some kinds of data files (generic separated by char). Browsers try to open those, and remove important data from the display (and the copy buffer).

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