This site will have limited functionality while we undergo maintenance to improve your experience. If an article doesn't solve your issue and you want to ask a question, we have our support community waiting to help you at @FirefoxSupport on Twitter and/r/firefox on Reddit.

Search Support

Avoid support scams. We will never ask you to call or text a phone number or share personal information. Please report suspicious activity using the “Report Abuse” option.

Learn More

Firefox 16.0.2 doesn't download rar files properly

  • 3 replies
  • 2 have this problem
  • 5 views
  • Last reply by cor-el

more options

Hi,

I got a report from a user of our website that they can't download rar files... I checked and indeed left-clicking to download a rar file doesn't work; FF doesn't seem to recognize the mime type and loads the file in-browser instead of prompting to Save As.

You can see this on an example here: http://www.sorcerers.net/Games/IWD2/Anarion_Custom_Portraits.rar

Zip files download fine. We've confirmed that this only happens in FF, so I assume it's a bug...

Hi, I got a report from a user of our website that they can't download rar files... I checked and indeed left-clicking to download a rar file doesn't work; FF doesn't seem to recognize the mime type and loads the file in-browser instead of prompting to Save As. You can see this on an example here: http://www.sorcerers.net/Games/IWD2/Anarion_Custom_Portraits.rar Zip files download fine. We've confirmed that this only happens in FF, so I assume it's a bug...

All Replies (3)

more options

Such issues happen if the server isn't configured correctly and the files are send as text/plain if Firefox opens the page in a tab as text like in this case.

You will have to instruct the server (cloudflare-nginx) to send the RAR files with an appropriate MIME type to make Firefox save the file.

more options

That could be a CloudFlare issue then since that's the CDN we started using a few days ago. But why would it work fine in all other browsers except Firefox? That doesn't make sense...

more options

Firefox always respect the MIME type if a server sends such a MIME type in the response header like in this case.
Other browsers may change there behavior according to the file extension or content sniffing, but Firefox doesn't do this and fails in cases like this where the server isn't configured properly.