McFang – Exercising Futility

If Firefox 2.0 does not recognise a mime-type it forces you to jump through hoops every time you wish to save a file of that type – never giving you the option to make a default action (eg. save-as) for the type.

Getting tired of this I eventually did some research to find a solution, case in point is the RAR file type (application/x-rar; application/x-rar-compressed).

Option 1: An Addon

Add the Mime-Edit extension that allows you edit any mime-type’s properties and actions, even those not recognised by Firefox.

Option 2: Hack

If you are confident in XML manually edit mimeTypes.rdf in your profile folder:

<RDF:Description RDF:about="urn:mimetype:application/x-rar-compressed"
NC:fileExtensions="rar"
NC:description=""
NC:value="application/x-rar-compressed"
NC:editable="true">
<NC:handlerProp RDF:resource="urn:mimetype:handler:application/x-rar-compressed"/>
</RDF:Description>

<RDF:Description RDF:about="urn:mimetype:handler:application/x-rar-compressed"
NC:alwaysAsk="false"
NC:useSystemDefault="false"
NC:saveToDisk="true">
<NC:externalApplication RDF:resource="urn:mimetype:externalApplication:application/x-rar-compressed"/>
</RDF:Description>

And in the section <RDF:Seq RDF:about=”urn:mimetypes:root”> add in this new row:

<RDF:li RDF:resource="urn:mimetype:application/x-rar-compressed"/>