Atlassian linux are downloaded in Internet Explorer 11 as Text and kills the browser

Question

Hi!

It seems that all the bin files are wrongly tagged as text on the download server.

This seems not restricted to Jira product.

Unfortunatly downloading files from the internet in our enterprise is only allowed on windows clients with Internet Explorer, so please fix this!

Kind Regards

Torsten

Andy Heinzer · Accepted Answer

Hi Torsten,

I found that I could reproduce this problem in my IE 11 instance.  However this actually appears to be because the Windows environment does not understand how to handle this file type.   I don't think this is something that Atlassian can change on that download site to prevent this problem with this OS/browser.  I believe the reason this is happening is because the browser is trying to be helpful, but honestly it does not understand what this filetype is and in turn it does not understand that it should be saving this instead of trying to open it directly in the browser.

There are a couple of different ways to work around this.

Quick work-around:

After you select the download type on that download page, you can still right click on the green Download button and select the "Save target as.." to save this as a file.

More complex, but more thorough work-around:

* In Windows Explorer (not IE), you can press the ALT key to bring up the file menu, then go to Tools -> Folder Options:
* Click the View tab and make sure to uncheck the box called "Hide extensions for known file types".  We want to see all the file extensions.
* Go Back to the desktop, right click on an empty space and select New -> Text document.  This will create a file with a .txt extension there.
* Rename this new file to test.bin (make sure to remove the .txt ending)
* double click on this new test.bin file to open, windows will prompt you to select a program to open this filetype.  In my case I selected notepad, and make sure that you leave the checkbox enabled to  "associate all .bin files with this application".   This has the effect of adding the .bin extension to the windows explorer system.  That is needed to prevent this problem.

From that point I then closed IE to make sure my setting changes were taking effect.  And then when I returned to the Atlassian download site in IE and selected a Linux bin installer, a single left click on the download button then prompts IE to ask the user if they want to "Open, Save, Cancel".   Select Save.  From that point on IE should always prompt you and ask what to do when it sees this kind of filetype.

You could also associate this filetype with another program like a compression application like winzip, 7zip.  Not all bin files might be truly compressed files, but it serves as a means to tell the browser that this is a filetype the browser is not expected to be able to open.