Handling Mac IE download problem

[pauleric]

I'm adapting osCommerce for a professional photographer who sells images online. We ran into the known 'Save As' defect in Internet Explorer for Mac computers.

 

This is the bug:

When a customer uses the download feature, they will either see the downloaded image in the browser window or they will be prompted with a Save As dialog. This depends on your individual configuration of osComm. The problem is that in both cases, Mac IE thinks the file name is download.php and not the actual image file name. This problem only occurs with Mac IE and has been known for years. It occurs because IE takes the file name before the redirect occurs and doesn't change it to the redirected file name. For some reason, Microsoft never fixes it.

 

There are many many proposed solutions on dozens of newsgroups however after hours of research we finally found one that works as a typical user would expect. Most solutions didn't work at all, possibly because many developers are using Windows or Linux machines for testing. Many said they don't have a Mac to test with. The problem with selling photographs to graphic designers is that many (most?) use Macs. All of our customers need an intuitive download facility.

 

Solution:

The solution is to not fight with the Mac's assumption that the file it downloaded (after php redirected) is the name of the script (download.php). We create a php script that calls download.php and we name this script photo.jpg. We then use .htaccess to make Apache/php understand that photo.jpg is actually a PHP script. When the Mac IE browser comes up with the Save As dialog box, it defaults to "photo.jpg" which is reasonable. All other browsers (including Windows IE) properly defaults the file name to the actual image file name (example: sunset.jpg or whatever).

 

We also found many people on the newsgroups have trouble forcing the browsers to launch the Save As dialog. The key is to use the correct Headers and to not enable Redirect. We appear to have it working for all OSs and all browsers (at least many in Windows, Linux, Mac).

 

We also modified ocComm to allow thumbnails, larger watermarked images and then allow full size images for download (1, 10 and 35 meg sizes) under a secure setup. Security is always tricky when controlling download access to only paying customers.

 

Hope this helps. If you need more info, let me know.

 

/paul

[spayce_girl]

I use a Mac and had this problem w/no clue how to fix it. Can you upload the script you used. It's been some time since you posted this so hopefully someone who have found this fix will help!!!

 

Thanks.