When a company fails to disclose a location to which bugs in its products can be sent, I’ve made it a habit of posting them here instead. Somehow, this strategy tends to get a response. Also, this helps others avoid going through what I had to in order to debug the problem.
I recently purchased a new HP laptop with an embedded Validity fingerprint reader. Upon installing Firefox, I noticed that executable links were not working properly – they were not being followed. At first, I chalked this up to AVG 8, as it has some new (buggy and slow) “linkscan” feature, but uninstalling and reinstalling AVG and Firefox yielded no luck.
Finally, I looked on the list of add-ons to see whether there was something there that could be causing this problem. DigitalPersona’s add-on was the only one present.
I tried disabling it and suddenly the links were working again. Re-enabling it caused them to stop once more.
Thus, there is something in the DigitalPersona Firefox extension that is causing the browser to cease following executable links.
Fortunately, right clicking and selecting “save as…” still works, so I’ll use that as a workaround for the time being.
And to DigitalPersona: Provide a forum for users to submit bugs or those bugs will not only never reach you directly, but will be scattered all over the Internet for everyone to read. One way or another, people post them. Far better for you that they reach your ears first.
ftp://ftp.hp.com/pub/softpaq/sp43501-44000/sp43883.exe
Just an update: the new Firefox 3.5 routinely switches of the DPpersonal extension, but in my case it works without problem when enabling it.
I enabled it by changing (or adding) line in the about:config screen \extensions.checkCompatibility\ (boolean) to false. Remember it can seriously crash your firefox copy if there’s an extension not so forgiving. But there’s always safe mode.
BTW HP has a newer version of DPPersonal on the driver site (a build sligthly older than the one directkly from DP; and buying the latest version from DP isn’t a very big investment.
Thanks man…
the javascript solution is working…
a huge relieve…after all this time righ-clicking in FF
Can someone post the new DigitalPersona 4.0? Software or just the firefox extension?
I’m getting crazy!
Thanks
I had to update to 4.0 as well, and the patch for firefox seems to work, although the installation routine is tedious. You have to restart the computer for each and every single little update. With Vista on your machine that’s almost a day’s job…
The 4.0 version of the software has a firefox update that seems to correct this issue.
FYI – I had to upgrade to 4.0 to get this update. It seems its not available yet for version 3.0.
An automatic update is already released that fixes this issue.
first it worked but restart firefox and you would not be able to use fingerprint, it was a great workaround but failed, btw I got the v4 of the soft and still have the same bug, (firefox extension is the same version as v3.1).
I prefer 3.1 since v4 added windows password login in websites, wich is a feature i dont want !
Good job jacoch and THANK YOU VERY MUCH!!!
This is bothering me for so long and you fixed it! Thanks!
Chris
Here is a better code for the isPreferred function. Replace the line return true by the following code:
if (contentType.indexOf(‘application/’) > -1) {
return false;
} else {
return true;
}
In this case, when Firefox tries to open a document with mime type starting by application/ (for example application/vnd.ms-excel or application/zip), then it return false and the doc opens. Otherwise it returns true. The if condition could be fine tuned to handle more precisely your needs.
It seems my solution needs more tweaking. Sure it works for documents, but when clicking on an usual link, FF always opens it in a new tab. I will try to improve this and post a better fix.
Found the same problem as everybody here. After disabling my AV, I finally discovered that the problem is due to DigitalPersona. By looking at their javascript, I found a way to have it work correctly. I have not tested everything, just that I can download files again and that I can log correctly to my favorite sites using my fingerprint. Maybe there are something else not working after my change, but as I have back the two functions I use, that’s fine for me. So here is the change I made in C:\Program Files\DigitalPersona\Bin\FirefoxExt\chrome\overlay.js. On line 522, in function isPreferred, just change return true by return false.
alt-click triggers a download on my HP Pavillion as well. It has the advantage that no new tab will open like with ctrl-click. Maybe it also works on other systems.
What works best however is a properly working extension… 😉
I am having this same problem in Firefox on my new Dell Studio 15. Fortunately there is a way to get around this for most sites…Ctrl-Click.
Ctrl-Click will open a link in a new tab and it does the same thing for clicking on files. Opens a new blank tab and then the download appears on screen. It’s annoying though as you need to close those blank tabs afterwards.
To find out that DigitalPersona was to blame I disabled all add-ons and then enabled them one at a time until the problem came back.
I also had this problem, do you know if there´s a fix for this bug already?
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