1722707 - Newly downloaded files by Firefox don't show up in macOS "Recents" category

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Core :: Widget: Cocoa, enhancement, P3)

Description

[vadim.peretokin]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.15; rv:90.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/90.0

Steps to reproduce:

Downloaded a file with Firefox - a calendar .ics in this case. Expected it to show up in macOS under recents, but it did not.

Comment 1

[vadim.peretokin]

It would really help convenience if newly downloaded files did show up under recents.

Comment 2

[BugBot [:suhaib / :marco/ :calixte]]

The Bugbug bot thinks this bug should belong to the 'Core::Widget: Cocoa' component, and is moving the bug to that component. Please revert this change in case you think the bot is wrong.

Comment 3

[Kris Wright :KrisWright]

Able to reproce this on MacOS Sonoma.

Comment 4

[Kris Wright :KrisWright]

Attachment: Bug 1722707 - Add downloads to recents on MacOS.

We already do this on Windows so this needed to be added to our mac file utils to match the behavior.

Comment 5

[Kris Wright :KrisWright]

I looked into this further and noted a few things:

• The way Recents works by default in Finder is that it completes a query for recently opened items. To add ourselves automatically to the list, we'd have to update kMDItemLastUsedDate which updates when LaunchManager opens a file. I'm not sure we want this behavior, as it would require automatically opening downloaded files.
  • This would create a new problem - all of our downloads would have a "last opened" date instead of a file creation date.
• Safari does not add files to Recents.
• These special queries are modifiable in MacOS, so the best way to get downloads to appear on one's device is to create a custom version of Recents.

Comment 6

[Kris Wright :KrisWright]

As for the patch I originally put up - this might be useful in the specific use-case of opening files internally with Firefox, but I'm not sure if we need it or not. Regardless, I decided to put it up for review. This bug may need to be resolved as wontfix, as we can't change the OS behavior.

Comment 7

[Kris Wright :KrisWright]

Until some time in which MacOS has parity to Windows in 'Recents' folder management, this bug is not fixable. The folder itself is a query for opened items. This is managed through MacOS' LaunchServices which cannot be changed without triggering an open on the document. As we don't want to issue a false 'last opened' date and we don't want to automatically open downloaded items, we cannot currently modify the default Recents query solely to suit the platform.