Another Firefox issue ...

How do I stop Firefox from trying to download the php file when I search the forum ?

I'm really trying hard to like Firefox, but it seems to me there's too many problems and bugs in it to make it truly more useful than Safari.

Also forum search seems to be borked in Safari if you search for more than one word !

If you are talking about URLs like /164/7b/101986/1.html there is no PHP loaded to your machine.

That URL asks forums.secondlife - using the everyday HTTP GET request - to get the named page showthread.php which causes a PHP program to run on the web server which generates a page. This is different on the server-side from a static HTML page, but as far as your browser is concerned, it just gets a pile of HTML from the server and doesn't know whether that was static HTML or a PHP program that generated the HTML. There is no difference between IE and Firefox in how they handle that URL; indeed, unless you installed something special (intentionally, not a plug-in) your machine cannot run PHP programs nor does it have the data it needs to compose the page.

For completeness sake, the ?t=101986 part is an argument to the PHP program running on forums.secondlife that tells it what HTML page to compose before sending it to you. You may think that PHP is being loaded to your machine as the forum web server is rather heavily loaded, but the PHP stays where it is. Indeed, if you tried to get the showthread.php program from the server you couldn't.

Hope that helps.

yes, thanks but actually I was wondering why Firefox caused Dreamweaver to run on my machine everytime I did a forum search earlier today. So I got it to show the download actions window which asks which action I'd like to assign to the file it's attempting to download and it was downloading zero length .php files.

Seems to work OK again now, perhaps the forum search engine was broken ?

Spoke too soon! ...



Note: there's no "stick it up your bum" option in the popup menu there ...

looks like you installed some program thats messed up how its recognizing files.

might be some plug in?

i have a stock install of firefox and it handles php fine, havent had that happen.

I thought that too at first, but it only happens on the SL site, I'm a member of several forums on the web, this only happens on the SL forum . ( Sometimes it works ok but often not )