Join the AMA (Ask Me Anything) with the Firefox leadership team to celebrate Firefox 20th anniversary and discuss Firefox’s future on Mozilla Connect. Mark your calendar on Thursday, November 14, 18:00 - 20:00 UTC!

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 downloads html page instead of opening it

  • 5 replies
  • 4 have this problem
  • 14 views
  • Last reply by cor-el

more options

I have an Apache web server (2.2.24) on a Red Hat Linux server (RHEL 5.8). On the web site I have a link to an html page that is not in the web directory, but is on the file system. When I click on the link to go to the web page, Firefox will not render the html page within the URL of the web site--it instead wants to download the html page before it displays the html. So, instead of getting http://mywebsite.com/help.html I get file:///C:Users/myuser/AppData/Local/Temp/Help.html. In internet explorer, the web page opens just fine: http://mywebsite.com/help.html--it does not try and download the file

I have an Apache web server (2.2.24) on a Red Hat Linux server (RHEL 5.8). On the web site I have a link to an html page that is not in the web directory, but is on the file system. When I click on the link to go to the web page, Firefox will not render the html page within the URL of the web site--it instead wants to download the html page before it displays the html. So, instead of getting http://mywebsite.com/help.html I get file:///C:Users/myuser/AppData/Local/Temp/Help.html. In internet explorer, the web page opens just fine: http://mywebsite.com/help.html--it does not try and download the file

All Replies (5)

more options
more options

Our httpd.conf file has DefaultType text/plain The web page in question has a header of:

  <META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Type" CONTENT="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
  <META NAME="GENERATOR" CONTENT="Mozilla/4.04 [en] (X11; I; HP-UX B.10.20 9000/879) [Netscape]">

And yet Firefox still wants to download the page instead of render it directly in the browser :-(

more options

The /conf/mime.types also seems to be configured correctly: text/html html htm

more options

More information. The "Help.html" page being called is a link

http://mysite/web/mydir/subdir/subdir/test/Help.html is the URL

On file system:

/usr/mydir/subdir/subdir/subdir/test has a link

Help.html -> /usr/mydir/otherdir/otherdir/form/Help.html

more options

With which MIME type does the server sends this page?

Firefox doesn't respect data present in meta tags when the server already sends this data in the HTTP response headers.