Firefox doesn't open local html files with space in path

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#1

When I try to open a local html file with space in the filepath firefox fails to open it. Here are steps to reproduce it on Ubuntu MATE 17.10 with firefox (all upgraded to latest versions from standard repositories).

Open terminal:
cd ~
mkdir ‘test ing’
cd ‘test ing’
echo ‘test’ > test.html

then right-click test.html file to open in firefox.

Actual results:

Instead of opening the file, a new firefox window will open with two tabs. One with path ‘file:///home/$USER/test’ and another with path ‘ing/test.html’ that the browser will them try to match with some url (https://www.ing.com/test.html) that will give 404.

Expected results:

One tab with path ‘file:///home/$USER/test%20ing/test.html’ (I 'm assuming here that firefox will handle the space like chrome does) showing the file as intended.

I have opened a bug report about this at Mozilla here. If you also experience this please help them verify the problem. I am not sure if it is more firefox related or more MATE related though.

Can people here test to see if they have this behavior?

#2

Works fine for me in UM16.04.
The navigation bar shows: file:///home/gabriel/test ing/test.html
and the tab shows: /home/gabriel/test%20ing/test.html

#3

I have noticed the bug sligthly recently, so I wouldn’t expect it to be present in 16.04 MATE. I think it’s a bug introduced by either firefox 58 or 59, because I 've only experienced it recently (and the first times I just discarded it by using Chrome). After realizing it happens more consistently I decided to investigate more.

#4

My FF version is 59.0.2 (64-bits) and UM16.04 is up to date.

#5

Also works fine for me in Ubuntu MATE Bionic (18.04 pre-release) with Firefox Nightly (61.0a1) from Mozilla.

#6

Hi @Karsus,

see also:

:smiley:

#7

Thanks for the suggestion @wolfman. I am going to update but probably some weeks after the release when things will have slowed down a bit. I uninstalled firefox, cleaned my system of it and re-installed and the problem was there. I then uninstalled, cleaned and then installed firefox-trunk through the nightly ppa and the bug wasn’t there. So it looks like it’s a specific problem to Ubuntu MATE 17.10, ff59 (and maybe something uncommon on my system).

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