Here's a UI experience pet peeve I'd be curious to hear some feedback about, especially with regards to whether it's confusing/unintuitive to a regular user:
You're in an application, maybe an email client, or an IM conversation, or (heaven-forbid) a terminal. There's a URL you'd like to click on, that goes to a PDF, .zip archive, or any other file that's not actually going to be viewable in a web browser. You click it.
What should happen? It'd be nice to see the content open up in the correct application. We have application and content preferences for this sort of thing. We can look at mime times, in particular.
What happens? A web browser window opens, with no content, and then the WEB BROWSER opens the http connection to the content you asked for, and then downloads it or streams it to another application.
Is this by design? Or would it make more sense for the desktop to poke the web server, get the mime-type of the content, and then open the relevant app? The desktop could even download the content, and continue streaming it to the application...
There's a catch that this requires 2 http connections, one to check the type of the content, and then one to open it. However, I'd argue that this type of interaction isn't going to be making so many connections that that would be a bottleneck in any way, or even likely a noticable delay in most cases (certainly not more than the delay of opening a web browser window). If it was critical, the double-connection issues could be addressed with a little clever proxy work...
Thoughts?
sounds good to me..
to NOT make this an entirely firefox depenent issue, i would suggest to re-integrate epiphany.
That way, we would have more flexibility on whether or not to open an extra app window or not for such an operation.