I do web development and design. I've just set up my PC (Ubuntu 14.04 LTS) and installed my choice of software.
On the .php files I set Firefox as the default software to open with but now it opens about 50 odd tabs in the space of 3 seconds. How do I fix this?
1 Answer
To parse a php file, you need a server set up (apache for example) and you need firefox to query for this file with the server. So install apache (or a server of your preference), set the DocumentRoot.
Now you can try typing the URL of the file relative to DocumentRoot in the addressbar of firefox, like so: localhost/index.php. This will open the file normally.
Explanation:
What's happening is, firefox doesn't process a php file by itself, it doesn't know how. So when you open it, it treats it as a file to be downloaded and opened, so it downloads and tries to open it. Now since the default software to open a php file is firefox itself, a new tab is opened, and the whole process repeats indefinitely.
When you type the address of the file in addressbar, firefox actually makes a request to Apache (or whichever server) for the file, and the server will do the task of parsing php and converting it into HTML.
