[Discuss] Yet another reason why Internet Explorer is bad....

[Adam Parkin]

Okay, I know this is preaching to the choir as I'm sure that 100% of 
VLUG readers don't use Internet Explorer as their browser, but I'm 
justifying this mini-rant as a "sharing info that perhaps we should be 
aware of".

I'm the TA for CSC 212 this term at UVic and for the course students 
need to grab a Java jar file from the course website, download it to 
their lab machine and run the software.

I figured no biggie, just put a link to the jar file on the course 
website, and when students click the link they get the "Open or Save As" 
dialog.  In Firefox this of course works as it should, when the user 
clicks Save As, it saves a copy of the jar file to their local machine.

In IE however, it realizes that a Jar file is just a Zip file in 
disguise, and *automatically renames the file* to become a zip file 
instead.  Thus, then what happens is students get a zip file on their 
desktop instead of a Java jar file, and when double-clicking it they get 
the standard compressed file viewer in Windows instead of running the 
actual software creating confusion as to why the software won't work as 
it should.

In what possible way could a browser automatically renaming a file that 
the user has asked to download be a good idea?  In the Windows world of 
file extensions determining a file's type this completely changes the 
meaning of what the file is and how it's handled.  Recall as well that 
by default Windows will hide file extensions from the user, so there's 
no way for users to fix the problem unless they go into Windows 
Explorer's options and turn on "Show File Extensions" (which any decent 
user *should* do, but of course the default is what ACTUALLY happens in 
  most cases).  Even then they still need to know that the file should 
be renamed to have an extension of jar and not zip.

Horribly, horribly poor design decision by MS.

Note: this was tested in IE 7 as that's what's installed in the UVic 
labs, and the only version on my office machine.  Don't know if prior 
versions do the same thing.
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Adam Parkin
E-mail: pzelnip at gmail.com
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