Ever since I installed Mozilla Firefox 2.0 I have noticed that certain file extensions that I used to be able to "Open" by clicking now pop up this new dialog box that doesn't show the open option at all, and only allows FlashGot. It took me a while to realize that there was a "Save" button that would allow me to save the file, and open it from the download manager. Why should I have to go through the extra step.

Full details after the jump.

I did a bit of googling, and found this flame war that erupted in July while Firefox 2.0 was still in Beta, which lead me to bug #315536 and yet another flame war.

It appears as if the intent was to "protect" people from accidentally configuring Firefox to always open executables without prompting. In my opinion, they threw the baby out with the bath water, and now any mime-type that isn't explicitly configured in Firefox gets the new screwy dialog:

This annoyed the hell out of me, so I decided to try a suggestion from that first flame war. I found the nsHelperAppDlg.js file in C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\components and changed:

      if (shouldntRememberChoice && noDefaultApp) {

To:

      if (shouldntRememberChoice && noDefaultApp && false) {

After a quick restart of Firefox, the dialog changed to:

This may get overwritten if I upgrade/re-install Firefox, but I can deal with that. This is a simple enough change that just about anyone should be able to do it. It's always a good idea to make a backup copy of the file before you make the change though. Enjoy!

Crossposted from my home blog KeepAustinCorporate.com