I want to see local markdown files in the Firefox browser formatted and displayed. I've discovered that Firefox is a real stickler for not displaying files unless they are of mimetype text/plain. Even if you install a markdown viewer extension, if you try to open a local file it was try and download the file instead.
To solve this, I had to configure the text/markdown mime type locally to be text/plain and then it worked fine.
cp /etc/mime.types ~/.mime.types