It would be useful and perhaps more friendly to allow a user to type in both filenames and URL's in the "File Open" dialog (CTRL+SHFT+L is rather awkward.) Perhaps, it might even lend itself to more of a universal "Open". First see if the local filename exists. If it doesn't then try the argument as a URL, if that doesn't work then file or URL doesn't exist. Feel free to throw this out if it doesn't make sense.

use ctrl-l. ctrl-o is linked to the file picker.

Reopening. This is an interesting idea, and one I've been thinking about for quite a while. It wouldn't be possible on Windows or Mac OS, where we use native file dialogs. But for the XP filepicker (used on Linux etc), it would be interesting to see if we could allow opening of URLs in the same dialog as opening of files. One benefit of this would be that we wouldn't need to impose a distinction between local items and remote items in the UI for bookmarks and history in the dialog(s). It's entirely possible that this idea won't work, but it's worth at least considering.

It *is* possible on Windows. See the attached screen shot of the MP3 player FreeAmp. It's possible to use extensions to the default file open dialog. (Note that the main part of the dialog is localized (to Norwegian), while the extension is in English (since FreeAmp is written in English, and not localizable).

What I was thinking was to emulate the Start Button->Run behavior. You type in a URL and it goes to the browser. Type in a filename and it opens a file. You could do if (file not found) then (try it as a URL) before throwing the file error unless the file not found errors are generated from the native file open dialog box. [Is it possible to override that behavoir and just return to the program if the file wasn't found and then act on that information?] It may not be feasible, but I thought autodetection from a one-line entry would be nifty and slick. Oh, well.. *sigh*

in w2k you can enter urls into the common dialogs [eg notepad] the result is that the os transparently handles them. (a) we should not be breaking os functionality (b) we should not risk confusing os handling of urls with our handling of them -- if we pretend to handle urls and someone enters a chrome url and it gives an os error on windows but works on linux people will be confused and blame us.

um. was i unclear in stating that ctrl-l does what the reporter wants? you can enter a file path [c:\windows\bootlog.txt] or a url. If you need to browse to a file then you type ctrl-o.

Timeless: don't forget that the file picker is used in many places in Mozilla, not just in File->Open for the browser window.

See also bug 81193, "Two `Open' items in the `File' menu".

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Reassigning obsolete bugs to their respective Seamonkey owners (i.e. nobody). If you want this fixed for Firefox, change the Product and Component accordingly and reassign back to me.

Filter "spam" on "guifeatures-nobody-20080610".