Firefox file associations

[Oleg Goldshmidt]

Hi,

Pardon my stupidity and confusion, I have what seems to be a rather
simple question, but I feel lost.

How can I add/modify a file/application association in Firefox? On
Linux or on WinXP for that matter? I tried to read every FM I could
find and the answer seems, amazingly, "you can't". It seems so basic
that I refuse to believe there is no solution unless/until someone
here confirms the sad state of affairs.

Here is the specific problem. I want to click on a link to a CSV file
to open it in a spreadsheet, be it OOCalc or Gnumeric or Linux, Excel
on Windows, etc. However, Firefox (3.5.5 on both platforms) apparently
recognizes it as a text file and cheerfully opens it itself, as plain
text, which is not what I want. The Edit->Preferences (Tools->Options
on WIndows) popup has an Applications tab that lists "Actions", but
CSV is not listed and there isn't any way to add it. The docs say that
the only way to add a new file type to the list is the first time you
click on a link to this type of file, where it offers you to download
or "open with". In this case I doubt even that was ever available
since apparently it is just a text file to Firefox. I found a
"knowledge base" article saying the only way to modify file
associations is to install a SeaMonkey add-on. I went to look at the
add-on - it seems totally obsolete, is supposed to work with FF 2.0
and is known to be buggy with 3.1. I will think a dozen times before
installing it.

Firefox does not seem to look at system customizations in this case
either. I *know* my KDE associates CSV files with OOCalc and Windows -
with Excel (the latter is the default, I think). Konqueror and IE do
the "right" thing.

FWIW, my browser of choice is Konqueror which is mostly sane. However,
I am testing something and I can't afford to omit Firefox from the
list of target browsers.

What am I missing? Has Firefox been dumbed down to this extent?

Thanks in advance,

-- 
Oleg Goldshmidt | pub at goldshmidt.org