What Internet browser do you use?

[Caelestis]

I use Opera for all my browsing... it seems to have the least shortcomings...

It might not have the most positives, but it has the least negatives.

 

[ExCyber]

ExCyber the one thing you gotta remember is that the great majority of people who have webpages do not have enough access to their webservers to alter the MIME settings.

I'm not saying it's their fault (I said developers/admins, not webmasters). It's a combination of web server vendors shipping broken default configs and server admins / script authors who typically don't even know that the problem exists and therefore do nothing to fix it.

Most people wouldn't care either.

Yeah, and most people don't care what makes their telephone work when they pick it up and dial a number or what makes their TV work when they hit the power button and turn on their favorite show. This doesn't change the fact that there have to be people who do care if these things are to work for everyone else.

At the very least if the file extension isn't that of a known web type it should download the file instead of trying to open it.

Trying to figure out and communicate what is or is not a "known type" is the exact problem MIME types are supposed to solve, particularly in cases in which there may be no filename (e.g. dynamically generated content). If you want to move the decision elsewhere, why do you expect that conformance will be better than it is with HTTP/MIME?

And just imagine being a webadmin for a number of sites and needing to add new mime types for all the possible file types out there. You'd go nuts trying to cover all the bases. Back then you only had a few types to worry about, text, gif and jpg and that's it. Now since alot of different file types are available trying to keep a good mime list would be hell.

IANA keeps a (definitely incomplete, but hardly bare) list, and web server vendors could (and do, AFAIK) pick up most of the slack of maintaining preconfigured lists in their server distributions. But the server could solve the bulk of the incorrect type problem in an HTTP-compliant way by just not sending the header at all when the type is not known instead of defaulting to text/plain or text/html (i.e. lying to the browser about the content type).

PUNJABEE: The mechanism to do auto-install comparable to IE is there, it's just that hardly anyone supports it because Mozilla is only like 5% of the market (and that's being generous).

 

[Riddick]

Firebord now got an update 0.8 and named changed to FireFox

 

[Curtis]

Yes...we know...there is a whole topic devoted to that fact in General. :huh

 

[Gallstaff]

WTF....

 

[Pearl Jammzz]

Riddick is quick....vrooom!