A lot of times when I want to get a pic of something I’ll type it in and do a google image search. Pretty normal, right. Here’s an example of a page I might click on.
So you get there and you get the frame with the bit from google in the top, and the original page on the bottom. Used to, rather than looking for the pic in the frame below, I’d simply click the image at the top part and then it would load the image individually.
Now when I click it (These are JPG images) it opens up some save file dialog…And when I click on the “open” radio button instead, it says something like ((“null”)).
That happens to me on that page, too. Windows XP, FF 2.0.0.13 here.
The null is probably because you don’t have an action defined under tools/options/content/file types. But you shouldn’t need an action for a jpg, obviously. Maybe it’s a non-standard jpg that Firefox doesn’t recognize automatically? I did quickly check it with a hex editor and I didn’t see anything obvious.
IE does the same thing and says of it “type: CorelPhotoAlbumPhoto, 119k”. Hmm.
When hitting ‘open’ for the OP’s link, I did indeed see the error. Its like firefox forgot how to open JPGs. I went to Preferences --> Applications --> JPEGs and selected ‘Preview’ (the application), and that has resolved the problem (except I would prefer to open with firefox).
This is actually because that’s what google is telling the browser to do, for whatever reason: the google page for that image is returning a “Content-Disposition: attachment” header, which instructs the browser that this is a download link, not a view link. So this is actually an annoying Google problem.
ntucker is right. To expand a bit on what he’s saying, when your browser asks for the picture, the server–lh3.google.com–responds with not only the actual content of the image, but a bunch of header information that describes what it’s sending.
This HTTP header information tells your browser a number of things about what it is receiving so that it will know how to display it. This includes things like its content type (is it a web site? a picture? a song?), its encoding and its date modified.
Here Google tells your browser that the file is an attachment, and therefore should be downloaded and not viewed within the browser. This is helpful for photo sharing sites like Picassa because the site can include a download link that prompts the user to save the file, rather than just showing it to them.
