iKaushal

This article should be helpful to Firefox powerusers who download lots of different stuff, files of different extensions daily; but they need to manually select “Save to disk” every time they want to download something. This should give you an idea what this article is about.

For very few instances, this problem can be solved by modifying the action that Firefox should take when it detects a file extension of certain type.

What you could do to only modify/remove the actions for file extensions recognized by Firefox…

• Go to Tools -> Options -> Content -> File types -> Manage
• That will open a window titled “Download Actions”.
• Normally the actions will be predefined only for music and video files. You won’t see any action for .zip, .rar, .doc, .xls and such sorts.
• The irritating thing is that in this window, you can only change/remove an action; you cannot add your own action; e.g. I cannot add an action to open .svg (scalable vector graphics) files in Inkscape (inkscape.org) by default.

Strangely, Firefox does not have any default action for a common extension .rar (WinRAR Archive). What will help you in such cases when you need more than just the liberty of change/remove actions…

• Install the MIME Edit extension from this page. [Note: At the time of writing this, the extension version was 0.6 and was compatible with Firefox versions 2.0 – 2.0.0.*.]
• That’s it! Restart the Firefox and you are free to add/change/remove any action for any extension as you want from Tools -> MIME Edit…

Here is an example of what I entered in the fields while creating an action for .rar files:

You only need to find out or figure out the MIME Type for the file extension for which you are adding a new action. Googling for something like “MIME type list” (without the double quotes) should help. For instance, this could be a helpful site for starters. I couldn’t find the MIME type for .rar files, but noticed that for tar archives the MIME type was ‘application/x-tar’, for gtar archives, it was ‘application/x-gtar’. So I figured out that ‘application/x-’ was the MIME type for archive formats; and in the same fashion, I guessed that ‘application/x-rar’ should work for .rar files, and it did!

Now downloading .rar files is as fast as it takes to click on its hyperlink and it gets downloaded in my default download folder without any dialog boxes popping up.