I posted the above question yesterday, and after clicking on the e-mail link sent to me to confirm it, I was taken to a list of recently asked questions, but mine was not on it, and was still not on it even hours later. And I saw no way today to get back to the list of recently asked questions. In fact, when I re-clicked the confirm link in my e-mail, I was told "We could not activate your account. Make sure you clicked the correct link" But it was the link Foxfire sent me. And that happened even though I was in fact logged in to Foxfire help at the time. Now, when I finally gave up and started to re-enter my question, Foxfire found a similar one it suggested might answer it... namely the very question I asked yesterday, retrieved at last and shown above. So now I have TWO questions: (1) My original question, still unanswered above; and (2) Why am I getting all these errors when I try to find it?

We see lots of duplicate questions on the forum a few minutes apart. Hopefully someone will get everything to run in "real time" eventually.

As for the issue at hand, it's hard to see why Windows 7 and Windows XP would be different...

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To see your posts, you can use this link:

https://support.mozilla.com/en-US/questions?filter=my-contributions

Thanks for the link. As to my main problem, I assume it's something to do with how this Foxfire is configured on this computer. All I can say is the version of Quicktime that's listed in the Applications tab of the Options dialog in Foxfire, 7.6.4, is the same one that my desktop shortcut to Quicktime loads. And the same MOV files, linked to by the same PDF downloaded into the browser from the same website, work on Internet Explorer on this same XP PC.

Well, it turns out that my laptop, which is also XP, has the same problem. The MOV files load fine in Internet Explorer but not in Foxfire, where I get the same error message about Cannot play <filename> ... may not be present. That PC, which has never been to the website in question till now, has Quicktime 6.5.1 in its Application list, which is the same version of Quicktime that the QT icon on the desktop opens, and which is presumably used by Internet Explorer. On the other hand, Foxfire on my two Win 7 64-bit PCs opens the same MOV files from the downloaded PDFs just fine. The XP laptop has Foxfire 3.6.13. The desktop XP and the two Win 7 PCs are at Foxfire 4.0.1.

What could it be about the way Foxfire is configured on these two XP PCs that leads to the problem?

In further testing, it appears that when the MOV file is actually embedded inside the PDF, instead of being pointed to by a link within the PDF, Foxfire is willing to display it. This suggests an issue regarding the configuration of Security in Foxfire. But the only parameters I see that could be implicated at all are Block reported attack sites and Block reported forgeries, neither of which is likely in the case of this brand new site (only a few days old). And indeed un-checking them does not change the behavior.

Remember that this happens only in both of my Foxfire on XP PCs. It does not happen in Internet Explorer on those XPs, and it does not happen in my Foxfire on two Win 7 64-bit PCs.

So far I have only described this problem on XP. It turns out that I have the same problem with Firefox on the Mac (OS 10.5.8) - actually TenFourFox since Firefox itself seems not to want to load there. It seems evident from the studying the Mac situation that the problem stems from the Mac (therefore presumably XP as well) downloading the PDF, and expecting links within it to be found on the directory to which the PDF is downloaded, since the links themselves contain no mention of the directory on the server where the files reside, this being the same as the one where the PDF is. The problem goes away if the link includes the full path to the MOV file, starting with http://, continuing with the site name, www.aslparataxis.info, then the directory name, then the name of the MOV file. But changing all the links in that way would be a huge problem since there are 540 such links on the site. Surely there must be a way to tell Firefox to assume the same directory on the server where the PDF resides, rather than the one to which the PDF was downloaded? Are these just immutable differences between the way Firefox was written vs. the way Internet Explorer and Safari (which does not have this problem on the Mac) were written?

I appreciate your doing the detective work! When you create a web page, you can set a tag with the base URL that is used to point relative links to the correct location:

<base href="http://www.aslparataxis.info/folder1/">

According to an Adobe page (Adobe Acrobat 9 Standard - View document properties), PDFs have a similar feature, but I don't know how to add them to an existing PDF:

"In the PDF settings for Acrobat, you can set a base Uniform Resource Locator (URL) for web links in the document. Specifying a base URL makes it easy for you to manage web links to other websites. If the URL to the other site changes, you can simply edit the base URL and not have to edit each individual web link that refers to that site."

Hopefully you can find an affordable way to do that.

WinXP and Firefox 3.6.17 - it looks like Adobe Reader 9.4.0 is doing some "blocking". See the screenshot.

Thanks, ed, but that's not the problem. Indeed Adobe Reader is doing some blocking, but it does this merely to make you and me accept the responsibility for any malware damage that occurs. If you simply click on Options and say you trust this PDF, you can proceed.

Thanks, jscher, that looks like it may turn out to be a good solution eventually. The place you speak of can be found at File > Preferences in Adobe Acrobat. In theory, if I were to specify the base directory for each PDF, it should know where to look for other files in the directory where it resides. However, when I tried it for just one PDF, all the links in all the PDFs accessed on this site by the browser (or browsers - I think I tested both) on my Win 7 installation - which was working flawlessly before - suddenly STOPPED working. I got the same 'file not found' errors I had been getting in Firefox in both XP and Mac 10.5.8 - and I got it EVERYWHERE, not just on links from that PDF. Remarkably, this sounds like this base URL gets stored in RAM on the server itself, although the tech at my ISP (godaddy) assures me that this is not so. At any rate, I was so frightened at the outcome that for now I have backed out of this solution entirely. Since the site is working in the 'native' browsers of both operating systems (Internet Explorer and Safari, respectively). I will have to be satisfied with that for now, given everything else on my plate. Maybe I'll get back to it in a month or so, on a test website but not this one, which has to be up and working soon. Because of the constancy of this problem, though, across two OSs and platforms, perhaps it could be 'escalated' to the builders of Firefox if there's a way to do that?

P.S. It may be something so simple as the fact that I left off the final slash in the base URL. But even that should not explain how the whole site went haywire. I'll at least try adding the slash when I finally get back to it on a test site, when I have time to set one up.

One last thought did just occur to me: is it possible that the way Adobe implements this base URL is by instructing the BROWSER to append it to the front of all links without a path already shown on them?

I think the base URL probably is added by the PDF plugin when it sends the URL to the browser, but that's just a guess. You should be able to test locally without uploading the PDF to the server; that seems safer than experimenting in a live environment. (Unless the server is dynamically generating the PDFs...)

The Mozilla user base has had a number of grumbles about features of the PDF plugin that do not work the same way as the ActiveX control used in IE. I don't know how soon anything will change on that front.

IIRC, I read that Mozilla has plans for having a PDF reader built into a future version of Firefox. That might get around problems like this, and might eliminate the need for having a PDF program & plugin installed for users who simply want to read PDF files and not create or edit them.

edmeister, it would be wonderful if Mozilla were to build a PDF reader into a future version. However, I hope it would be as sophisticated as recent versions of Acrobat Reader. Earlier versions of the Acrobat Reader (prior to 6, I believe) cannot play video. Mac's default PDF view, Preview, also cannot play video.

Oh, I forgot to ask, edmeister, what does IIRC stand for?

if I recall correctly = IIRC

Chances are that if Mozilla does that, whatever they provide will be rudimentary and leave out the best features that an add-on now provides.

jscher, if I understand your speculation about how the base url works, it's the same as mine was. I tried it locally as you suggested, and it worked - which is to say the behavior was the same as it was with no base url. Then I copied it up to a test website, and it didn't work. I just get the same 'file not found' error on XP as before. I don't know why. And I checked to be sure I copied it right. At least this time the site didn't blow up, i.e., it didn't cause other web pages to blow up even on Windows 7. Maybe it's because I added the slash at the end of the directory this time. But it's a mystery.

Yes, that would be wonderful, but from what I have seen over the last 9 years with Firefox, that's not likely.

The biggest example is the spell check feature which was added to Firefox 2 or Firefox 1.5. That feature was created by Robert Strong (who I think had just been hired by Mozilla) who had created the SpellBound extension a few years prior. The new built in feature left out the separate free-standing spell checker window, probably to make it a little easier to use. But that overloaded the Context Menu with extra menu items and the "spell corrections". Plus, by removing that separate window, direct access to the personal dictionary file (user added words) was gone and the "accessibility" feature for visually challenged users for changing the color of the mis-spelled word underline was also gone. Firefox 3.6 and 4.0 have come with no "fix" or changes to PB.

More recently, Private Browsing was added to Firefox 3,5. PB isn't compatible with Vista and Win7 parental controls and there is no "switch" to allow the computer owner or a parent to turn off that feature altogether. Bugs have been filed about those issues and to the most part the Bugs have been "explained away" or a "fix" has been postponed for a few years without even one patch being contributed or tested.

Bottom line - don't ask for a built-in feature or expect that feature to be delivered in anything but a basic form. IMO, Mozilla adds new but incomplete features and then doesn't follow through later on and finish the feature.

It's such a shame. There's so much about Firefox I like: particularly the new clean menu, unlike the one in IE, which has so many search boxes that I type URLs in the wrong place whenever I'm using it. And it's always great to escape the clutches of the Evil Empire. But for this site I have no choice but to tell my users they must use IE on the PC, and Safari on the Mac. (Except Windows 7, where up to now at least, both Firefox and IE have been working correctly for my site on both my 64-bit Win 7 PCs; both browsers also work for my website on my daughter's Vista PC.) Thanks for all your help.

Quite honestly, I question the choice of using PDF files and hyperlinks within the PDF files. PDF is more of an "office" format intended for "documents", not for "web pages". It involves an external plugin program to get those files to open in a web browser; you have no control over which PDF reader program your visitors have installed, just like you have no control over which web browser they choose to use. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDF