And I really mean it. The number one source of frustration with software applications is a bad error message at the wrong time. In fact it's always the wrong time for error messages. Given this the error message should not just say 'hey! somethings wrong'. It should also say "do this or this to be able to continue". Even better - it should allow you to solve the problem immediately.
When a error message popped up you already lost time. And when the message is of no help to accomplish the task you were just intended to do it is very frustrating - it sucks!
Recently I had to battle with such an error message using Firefox. Previously I associated MS Office files with OpenOffice. When downloading a file for the first time, Firefox asks you what to do and you are able to select a program. In addition there is a checkbox that prevents this question in the future and always performs the preferred action.
Suddenly this stopped working and I got this error message:
"<<filename>> could not be opened, because the associated helper
application does not exist. Change the association in your preferences."
I just had to open a document quickly and wasn't able to do it. After clicking on OK nothing happened anymore. The only hint it gave me was to check my preferences, but in the preferences UI I did not found any helper application registered.
At that time I had no time to google for it, so I just downloaded the file using the context menu action from the link that pointed to the document and opened it manually. But in the long term this got frustrating. More and more time was wasted. Finally I took the time to search the web for it and until I found the solution on MozillaZine lost more and more time.
So what's the problem here?
Somehow the OpenOffice binaries have been moved during an upgrade. On Linux this is no big deal in general, since all applications are in the path. However in combination with the frustrating behavior of Firefox that it can associate mime types with applications from absolute paths it suddenly did not find the binary any more.
So Firefox knows somewhere in a configuration file (mimetypes.rdf) the path to the application. How hard is it to mention the path it tried to run the helper application? This should be pretty easy and would have been very helpful as a cheap solution. All I would have had to do would have been to create a simple symbolic link. But as I did not know, were Firefox expected the helper application I was left standing in the rain.
However I still wouldn't consider this as user friendly. Why doesn't it just open the dialog that asks you what to do with the file as it did for the first time this mime type was opened? I don't believe that this is very hard either.
So the problem was in fact in the mimetypes.rdf file. MozillaZine recommends to simple remove this file and it will be recreated at the next start. But then you'll loose all other helper application associations with unaffected mimetypes also. I tried to understand the huge XML file to repair it for a couple of minutes and then decided to delete it and save up the time for more important things to do.
In the end me - as a end user - was left on my own by this error message with no helpful indication of what to do where I still believe that a user friendly solution would have been very easy to implement.
Now you may say that I shall submit a bug report. I did that in the past a couple of times for various Mozilla applications. However unlike bug reports for other projects like KDE or Ubuntu, the response was always zero. So I'll rather save this time and write this article to help others, who run into the same problem and I had to get this off my chest.
