Octet streams in FF 3.5.2

FF seems to have difficulty opening some links to pages now, and gives me a file open dialog box talking about opening an octet-stream:



This seems to have just started recently in FF, not sure if it was in the prev. release or just this 3.5.2 one, but it seems to be getting more prevalent.

Anybody else having this problem? Any solutions?

 

http://support.mozilla.com/tiki-vie...ents_parentId=333829&forumId=1&s=octet stream

may be a possible workaround & explanation there

 

Thank you both for the references, they provided some interesting reading.

The confusing thing is that the problem links were supposedly to web pages, not to downloads of any type, so perhaps the destination is somehow mis-configured and sending incorrect header info. Ah well, life's full of these little mysteries.

 

Ah, that's interesting. In the specific case that the screenshot above showed, it didn't give me any indication of filename -- that middle area that one would think would display some identification was blank, just as shown -- so I had no idea of what kind of file it was trying to serve. Because I was expecting just a web page it was confusing.

I was just about to write "but not particularly alarming as I knew the destination domain so I wasn't concerned about it from a security standpoint" but I guess that's exactly the scenario where the bad guys triumph when they hack innocuous websites, or interject bad stuff in between the website and the user.

It seems like this has happened several times in the last couple of weeks, so I thought perhaps it was something in the new(er) FF updates that was being more strict with recognizing header info.

 

In the forum thread I posted, the problem site which OP stated was just page with flash (when viewed with IE). So perhaps we can draw some parallels from there too.

 

I just came across a link that gave me the octet-stream message. Temporarily allowing all the page in NoScript made the link work correctly again.

This was on a Yahoo group page, where there's a link at the top of the messages to choose whether to display the messages individually or to group them by topic.

The link was this (x's for obfuscation):

hxxp://groups.yahoo.com/group/xxxxxx/messages/3802?xm=1&m=p&tidx=1

I'm running NoScript 1.9.8 on WinXP. I'll post the issue on the NoScript site.

 

For the record, I've finally figured out the "trigger" to the odd behavior -- it's related to the speed of the mouse click. Clicks that are too fast cause the mis-interpretation of the link and thus the wrong interpretation of what the link is supposed to do. If I click again, more slowly, it works perfectly.

I haven't changed the speed of my mouse clicks in WinXP for a kazillion years, haven't changed mice, am not having odd click behaviors in any other app or in Windows, so I'm still leaning toward it being something that has changed in either NoScript or in FF itself, going back about 2-3 weeks or so. I suppose there's a chance that it's the mouse button itself going wonky, but then surely I'd be having problems in other apps too.