Opera handles some file types itself, such as Web page documents. Others are passed on to plug-ins and external applications, or just saved on your computer. The File type preferences let you control Opera's behavior when it encounters different file types.
When you click on a link in a Web page pointing to a file, the server tells the browser which MIME type the file has. For instance, text/html is the MIME type for a normal Web page.
In most cases, identifying by MIME works just fine. However, quite a few misconfigured Web servers report incorrect MIME types. The two MIME types that are most frequently misreported are application/octet-stream and text/plain.
If Opera seems to perform a different default action than what you have configured it to do, you can identify files with these two MIME types by file extension instead.
Opera comes with a host of pre-set, recommended file types and default actions. Sometimes you may want to change the default action, or add new file types which are not predefined.
Note: Tampering with MIME types may have unwanted side-effects, so be sure you know what you're doing.
Note: Deleting MIME types may have unwanted side-effects, so be sure you know what you're doing.
Open with Opera | Opens the file using Opera itself. Opera can display text and several markup languages, images and video formats. Be sure that Opera can display a certain file type before choosing this setting. |
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Save to disk | Downloads and saves the file on your computer. You can also specify a folder to put all files of this type into (for example store all zip files in $HOME/download/zip). |
Open with other application | Specify explicitly which external application you want to use. You can also choose to pass the file address directly to the application. This is very useful with streaming multimedia. |
Use plug-in | Here you select which plug-in you want to use for this MIME type. Normally, you will not have to change this setting as it is handled automatically by Opera. |
Show download dialog | Lets you decide in each individual case. Opens a dialog where you can decide whether to open the downloaded file, or just save it to open later. |
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