1738396 - Download panel is opened even when "Always Ask me where to save files" is enabled

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 1738372

(Firefox :: Downloads Panel, defect)

Description

[Matthew Turnbull [Bluefang]]

When configured to "Always ask you where to save files" (browser.download.useDownloadDir = false), every download opens a dialog to choose a save location. From this dialog you can either start the download or dismiss/abort it.

The new Download Panel behavior appears to open the panel every time a download starts, and requires manual dismissal. With "Always Ask", this is basically prompting twice for every download. This is turning into a pretty annoying nag.

Actual Results:
After manually initiating a download, the Download Panel pops-up, indicating you started a download, and must be manually dismissed.

Expected Results:
After manually initiating a download, the download button indicator should update to show a download is in progress.

Comment 1

[:Gijs (he/him)]

Mass moving affected flag for download improvements issues found on Nightly to 96 (nightly from later today / tomorrow), as the download improvements pref will be disabled for 95 beta.

Comment 2

[:Gijs (he/him)]

This is a bit tricky because the previous prompt also offered the option to open the file (with one click, if it was the default option in the dialog), and that option is now gone. We're showing the download panel to ensure that there's no added friction for the workflow where you want to open the file.

We prompt for a location for "open" flows now, too, and so I'm not sure we have a clear signal based on which we could decide not to show the panel - we can't predict whether the user wants to open the file immediately, or not.

It sounds like in your workflow, you rarely (perhaps never?) want to open the files that you download immediately - is that fair? Or perhaps you just prefer needing an additional click in the cases where you do open the file vs always having the panel pop up?

In terms of the technical details, we could add a condition to this check:

    let shouldOpenDownloadsPanel =
      aType == "start" &&
      Services.prefs.getBoolPref(
        "browser.download.improvements_to_download_panel"
      ) &&
      DownloadsCommon.summarizeDownloads(this.downloads).numDownloading <= 1;

that checks the browser.download.useDownloadDir pref, so that shouldOpenDownloadsPanel is false if that pref is false. But I'm not clear if it's the right thing to do.

We should definitely consider not showing the dialog if the user was in fact prompted what to do with the file (ie the user has configured that file type to "always ask" in terms of deciding between open/save) -- but that's not really what this bug was filed about.

Comment 3

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

Set release status flags based on info from the regressing bug 1709129

Comment 4

[:Gijs (he/him)]

(In reply to :Gijs (he/him) from comment #2)

We should definitely consider not showing the dialog if the user was in fact prompted what to do with the file (ie the user has configured that file type to "always ask" in terms of deciding between open/save) -- but that's not really what this bug was filed about.

I filed bug 1739348 for this.

For the "always ask you where to save files" case, I don't think we want to automatically adjust the behaviour, based on the reasoning in my previous comment. We may end up providing an option for the panel as a whole in bug 1738372, which would enable you to turn it off and resolve the annoyance, so I'm going to dupe this over there.