From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.0rc2) Gecko/20020510 BuildID: 2002051009 Attempts to override handling of image/gif through the preferences for Helper Applications fails. In Netscape, changing the Helper for image/gif to the user-defined "xv %s" allowed the right-button pulldown menu item "View Image" to spawn an XV instance to view the image (while still displaying images on the webpage itself correctly), allow the image to be trivially zoomed, etc. So far it appears to be impossible to use XV (or ee or whatever) as the helper app triggered by "View Image" in Mozilla, up to Mozilla RC1. Bugs related: 98084, (18219), 98084 Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1.In Preferences->Helper Applications use "New Type" to create... 2.{ type, extension, type, app } = { GIF Image, gif, image/gif, xv %s } - other viewers besides xv, such as ee or the gimp, can also be used - 3.Hit OK, then OK in the parent window. 4. Right click on image GIF image, use "View Image" 5. Notice that the helper app does not appear to be being spawned. Actual Results: A new white-background Mozilla window containing the image. Expected Results: A spawned application containing the image (which, depending on the app, allows the zoom-in capability and so forth that mozilla itself lacks). It's troubling that the mozilla-handled types are not listed and individually overridable as they were in Netscape in its corresponding preferences window (under Unix). I believe the absence of this feature is a bug.

can you still reproduce this in 1.1beta?

In answer to Kai's question "can you still reproduce this in 1.1beta?": [Summary: Fundamentally yes, but the undesirable behavior has changed slightly] In version 1.1 beta, I was able to get the Helper Applications to at least have an effect on the images, but the effect is not the same as seen in the many versions of Netscape, and probably not what is intended. Detail follows: Helper Applications: File Types configured: application/postscript Extension: ps MIME type: application/postscript Handled by: /usr/bin/acroread Notes: the "/usr/bin/acroread" doesn't require the expected %s that was often necessary in Netscape. This item works perfectly as expected, spawning a remote acroread whenever a .pdf file is visited directly. image/gif Extension: gif MIME type: image/gif Handled by (trial 1): xv Handled by (trial 2): xv %s Handled by (trial 3): /pod/X11R6/bin/xv %s Handled by (trial 4): /pod/X11R6/bin/xv Handled by (trial 5): /usr/bin/ee %s Handled by (trial 6): /usr/bin/ee Notes: Most of the cause GIFs -AND JPEGs- to fail to display at all in Mozilla, and the external xv or ee viewer does not appear. Just based on the fact that both formats are being affected when only one is configured, I'd say that Helper Apps for images is still quite broken. Expected (Netscape-style) behaviour: Web pages should display all known image types normally, unless the right-hold menu is pulled up over an image and "View Image" is selected, at which point the Helper Application should be spawned, usually configured as "xv %s" or "ee %s" and using the command search path as usual. The xv/ee was also spawned when the URL of the GIF itself was entered directly. Also, Netscape displayed the simple name (with extension) of the image after the words "View Image", which Mozilla unfortunately doesn't do. The only clear improvement I can see so far is that at least user settings for images now have -some- effect, even if just negative, whereas before (with not exactly the same tests) we were unsuccessful is achieving any changed behavior from defaults at all, suggesting that user prefs on images either we not being evaluated at all or were being superceded in all cases by the builtins.

Sorry, apparently my experiments somehow turned on site image blocking. So the simple answer is now: No, no change in the bug. Helper Apps still have no effect on images, specifically image/gif.

I'm not shure, if this is a bug or a feature to avoid for example on windows Quicktime from stealing us PNG images

@reporter Does it work now with newer builds?

dupe of "Support using external programs to show non-inlined images" *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 58554 ***