This has been reported on many different distributions, it seems that since this change: https://cgit.freedesktop.org/xdg/shared-mime-info/commit/?id=2d385ff07eae60f9d92bf932ed7e95fa94dc276d Browsers like firefox and chromium are unable to play .swf videos but, instead, they try to download the file but, then, I cannot find any application ready to open them :/ You can see people are workarounding this issue reverting the change: https://superuser.com/questions/726789/flash-files-swf-prompts-for-download-instead-of-opening/783451#783451 https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=173295&p=2 https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2218732&page=2 The problem is that shared-mime-info upstream refuses to revert it because that definition is the "correct" one, but, as none of the major browsers are playing with it, I think we should revert it downstream until it is solved in mozilla/chrome sides... something that doesn't seem to occur soon as they are aware of the bugs for years and still no action :|
I cannot add chromium bug in See also... I leave it here then: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=380347
*** Bug 590612 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Well, I would apply this reversion even with a USE flag because shared-mime-info doesn't want to revert it blaming in "broken browser"... since that "broken browsers" are Firefox and Google Chrome and they also know the issue but doesn't fix the issue... I think we should do this downtream instead of trying to follow shared-mime-info upstream strategy of breaking this on purpose to force browsers to change and, meantime, causing all of us to rely on ugly hacks like editing this manually :S
I don't know if rely on a "vanilla" USE flag or something more explicit like "flash-workaround" :/
