pop up and download blockers

[pagetta]

On our existing codestone site, when you download a zip file, you click download, and instantly the window pops up offering you the option of opening, saving or canceling the file download. This site uses perl.

On our new site which uses php, when you click download, you get the little yellow bar at the top of the ie window, which asks you to 'click for more information', then you click download, and THEN the window opens asking you to save, open or cancel.

Is there a way to stop this happenning as some people are of the opinion that this pop-up blocker may confuse people and stop them froom downloading things.

Can anyone offer any advice or solutions for this, or an explanation as to why it happens on one site but not the other?

Thanks!

[mikmik]

That is a security feature in IE, on XP w/SP2, that is set by the user themselves. When that header appears, there is an option to see "options" (lol) and then you can add a site to 'always allow downloads from this site'(<-- oops, that is FireFox. In IE you add to 'trusted Sites).I suspect that you have added the perl script site to this, but not the php?

In any event, there is no way known to disable this from your site side of things.

Here is a site that has a link on the download page that leads to this page explaining to people wishing to download, how to set this up:
http://www.snapfiles.com/xpsp2_downloadchanges.html

On the actual download page, there is this message and link to the above page:

Freeware download

Information for XP Service Pack 2 users.

You may want to put something like this as a warning or just to make the 'useability' better! I sure appreciated it the first time I saw it on Snapfiles, even though I sort of had it figured out.

:O)

[ADAM Web Design]

mikmik is right. There's no direct way to disable it, since it is an XPSP2 feature that's enabled by default.

If, however, you do have a link informing XPSP2 users about what they're supposed to do in order to get your stuff, you should be fine for the most part. You will still get the odd non-reader who will rip you a new one because "it doesn't download for me and I can't get it and your site sucks and you're not changing my diaper for me and wahhhh wahhh wahhh". But if Codestone is what I think it is, then most of your users should be tech-savvy enough to be able to get the file from you.

By the way, you would run into the same problem, regardless of server-side programming language used. It's a block on client-side output.