Can't view PPS (PowerPoint Slideshows) on a website. Help, please?
An online class has PPS files to accompany lectures. When you click on the PPS file, it renders as a text file. When I look at "applications" in the FireFox Options menu, there seems to be no way to add a new application to the list.
In an older version of FireFox I used to be able to click on the PPS file and view the slideshow in a new FireFox tab, while listening to the the streaming lecture. Is there a way to do this with the current FireFox version, or something I can do to view these lecture slides online?
All Replies (4)
Hello,
Many site issues can be caused by corrupt cookies or cache. In order to try to fix these problems, the first step is to clear both cookies and the cache. Note: This will temporarily log you out of all sites you're logged in to. To clear cache and cookies do the following:
- Go to Firefox > History > Clear recent history or (if no Firefox button is shown) go to Tools > Clear recent history.
- Under "Time range to clear", select "Everything".
- Now, click the arrow next to Details to toggle the Details list active.
- From the details list, check Cache and Cookies and uncheck everything else.
- Now click the Clear now button.
Further information can be found in the Clear your cache, history and other personal information in Firefox article.
Did this fix your problems? Please report back to us!
Thank you.
Thank you for your answer.
What the browser is doing is opening .pps files as text files without asking whether to open or save the file. I don't think this is linked to cookies. However, I can't find .pps files in the list of file types to open, in the Tools... Options... Applications menu. I can't even find text files, so that I can get FireFox to *ask* what to do with the file instead of opening it automatically as a text file!
How do you stop Firefox from opening a file automatically, and get it back to giving you the Opening File window?
Firefox generally takes its cues from the "content type" indicated by the web server. If the web server doesn't have PPS, often it will tell Firefox to treat it as HTML (like a web page) or as plain text. Firefox does not override this based on the file extension, since web pages can have any file extension. This leads to the problem you're describing.
As a short term workaround, can you right-click > Save Target As to download the files?
There is at least one add-on designed to solve this problem: https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/force-content-type/ Unfortunately, I haven't used it and don't know how to make it handle .pps files the way you want.
As posted above, if you get the file rendered as a text file in Firefox then it is likely that in this case the server is sending the file as a content type text/plain.
You can verify that in "Tools > Page Info > General"
If such a file previously opened in a tab then you might have had a plugin that handles this file type or or an extension like IE Tab, but I think that in such a case the file would have to be send with a supported MIME type and not with some generic MIME type.
There are other things that need your attention:
Your System Details List shows multiple Flash plugins.
- Shockwave Flash 13.0 r0
- Shockwave Flash 12.0 r0
You can find the installation path of all plugins on the about:plugins page.
You can check the Flash player installation folder for multiple Flash player plugins and remove older version(s) of the plugin (NPSWF32) and possibly (re)install the latest Flash player.
- (32 bit Windows) C:\Windows\System32\Macromed\Flash\
- (64 bit Windows) C:\Windows\SysWOW64\Macromed\Flash\