IE6 Download-Problem

[ZeHa]

[there used to be some german text here, see next post for explanation]

[ZeHa]

Sorry, I was in the wrong forum wanted to post that into the German one.

Well, but I'll explain it here as well:
Does anybody remember this IE6 problem: You click on a link of a video or another binary file, and instead of asking you whether to Open or Save the file, the file simply gets displayed inside the browser window (with cryptic characters of course). Does anybody know if this is just a configuration problem, MIME-type related, or if this could also be a webserver problem? I think it didn't happen all the time, and I think I even had that problem with other browsers as well.

If anybody knows about that problem and what can be done about it, please let me know. There's also a workaround with right-click and Save as, but it would be very helpful to know the real reason of that problem for me. Thanks in advance!

[GWarner]

Although rare it still happens in IE7 and possibly IE8 too. I believe it has to do with how the page is coded or how the server is configured.

When it happens to me, I just go back to the previous page, then right-click on the link, then select "Save target as..."

Doesn't solve the problem permanently but it is a quick and simple work-around for it.

[Mike Stefanik]

That's generally a server configuration related problem, although some browsers can side-step the issue. What you'll find is some servers (Apache is notorious for this) will ship with a default configuration that says if the MIME type for a given file extension is unknown, default to text/plain (it really should be application/octet-stream). So when the browser requests the resource, the response header specifies Content-Type as text/plain, and the browser says "aha, a text file, I'll display the contents". Of course, different browsers may respond differently than this; for example, it may look at the data, see a bunch of non-textual characters and decide to ignore the content type returned by the server; or it may choose to ignore the server's content type designation altogether and make its own decisions about the content based on the extension and/or data.