Occasionally when you try to open (rather than download) a file online, Firefox doesn't know what application to open it with, and you will have to select the application. It displays a menu that is labeled "Choose Helper Application" but looks the same as the usual menu for uploading a file to a website.

If you just want to tell Firefox what application to open a file with, that would be easier if Firefox could instead display the launch menu from KDE or whatever desktop manager you're running. It would take less time than rooting through the files on your hard drive for the correct application, unless you happen to know exactly where it's stored. You're looking for an application, not a file per se.

You can always use /usr/bin/xdg-open as the application to launch files, it "should" open the correct program for all supported filetypes in desktop environments. Need's a bit of tweaking if your running a standalone window manager though.

Personally, i think it would be useful if it defaulted to using xdg-open (only if it's found in a common path; /usr/bin)

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I would imagine the problem here is that Firefox does not know which window manager or desktop you've launched it from. In my case, for example, if it were to try something like this it could open menus from KDE, Gnome or the XFCE I actually use.
Thanks for that tip coralfang, I may well try that and see how it goes.
Much worse, to my mind at least, is the way that FF has to load some image links* in an external program and even if you try to open in Firefox it gives an error that the file needs to be downloaded first. Am I the only one who sees this?
*certainly I get it with some JPEGs, but I seem to recall other image formats are sometimes affected.

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Hi newbiesforever,

Naturally something like this can depend on a variety of factors, but I'm using KDE 4.6 and FF ( Firefox ) 10.0, and for me, when the "Choose Helper Application" window comes up, one thing I get is a "tree" of applications, organized by category, somewhat like the application launcher menus for KDE. Above the tree, near the top of the same window, there's an area where I can just type in the name of an application. To me, that seems even easier than using the tree of applications. If I really wanted to dig through the files on my hard drive for the application, over to the right of the area were the application name can be entered, there's an icon to click, to browse the files.

In the environment I'm using, exactly what happens when the "Choose Helper Application", or even if it comes up, can depend on how I have "file associations" configured outside Firefox . So in my situation at least, FF does seem to respond somewhat to the environment in which it's running. That's true even though I am not using a version of FF that's "branded" for the distro. I use.

Although I like Firefox enough that it is the main web browser I use, I'm not aware of any comprehensive, detailed, official Mozilla User-level documentation.

Using the so called "Firefox Help" from within FF, there appears to be all sorts of details that either aren't there, or don't seem easy to find.

For example, I have a hierarchical collection of a substantial number of folders, folders within folders, for book marks. When I want to create a new book mark, I get a little window, which seemingly can not be re-sized, and so can be too time consuming when choosing a folder. Even though there is no area provided to type in the name of an existing folder, one time I tried typing a folder name, sure enough, FF searched for the folder name. That works much more quickly than scrolling through a substantial list of folder names. But I have so far, not easily found any mention of that feature, in the Help. There seems to be other things missing as well. I've often wonder how much is missing.

So I feel I've seen plenty of electronic documents which seem much more effective than FF's help.

But there are FF support forums on Mozilla's web site, where you might want to ask exactly what affects choosing a Helper Application.

Try nautilus instead, there you'll find an "open with..." option in the context menu of any file of the desired type. What you one hav chose n in nautilus is what firefox/icedove will use, too.

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For file types that are actually supported by the browser, the problem comes from the servers that host them offering them with an unknown/unsupported mime-type, and a couple of long-standing bugs in FF.

The Open In Browser extension provides a useful workaround for these.

http://spasche.net/openinbrowser/