[clue-talk] Firefox & helper applications

[Matt Gushee]

Hi, all--

I am finding that Firefox sometimes doesn't let me set up helper 
applications in the way that I'd like to. For example, I want to play 
MP3s with XMMS. But somehow it has been decided (without my consent, 
dammit!) that RealPlayer is the default handler for MP3s. So when I 
click on an MP3 link, a dialog comes up saying

   You have chosen to open

     ******.mp3

   which is a MP3 audio

So it seems to correctly identify the file, but in the "Open with" box, 
it shows "realplay (default)." And what's really annoying is that the 
"Do this automatically for files like this from now on" checkbox is 
disabled, so I have to manually choose /usr/bin/xmms every time. Then 
again, it seems to me I have tried checking that checkbox for one or 
another file in the past, and it has never seemed to have any effect.

Then there's Edit -> Preferences -> Downloads, with its stupidly 
crippled functionality. *If* the mime type in question were listed 
correctly, I could maybe edit it, but it's not clear that the MP3 type 
is listed correctly. Yes, there are entries for audio/mpeg and 
audio/x-mpegurl, but (a) when I inspect them, they already show 
/usr/bin/xmms as the handler, and (b) they don't seem to be associated 
with the file extension MP3 ... at least, some of the entries look like 
this:

   AVI   AVI file        Open with mplayer
   MID	MIDI Audio	Open with timidity

Whereas the audio/mpeg entry looks like this:

         audio/mpeg      Open with xmms

So there seems to be no way to deal with this through the GUI. I found a 
file in my user profile directory called 'mimeTypes.rdf', which appears 
to be relevant ... but changing that had no effect, nor did removing it 
from the directory. In any case, it's a little hard to tell how to edit 
that file without some documentation, which I haven't found yet. The 
online user docs for Firefox don't seem to mention 'mimeTypes.rdf'.

Anyone dealt with this issue before? TIA for any fixes or workarounds.

--
Matt Gushee
Englewood, CO, USA