Download panel is not automatically opened when download begins
Categories
(Firefox :: Downloads Panel, defect)
Tracking
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People
(Reporter: martin, Unassigned)
References
Details
User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:103.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/103.0
Steps to reproduce:
Tried to download anything, e.g. picture from main Google site.
Actual results:
Download panel should pop up showing download progress, but it did not.
Note: ... looking into about:config, the settings are:
browser.download.alwaysOpenPanel is set to true
browser.download.improvements_to_download_panel is set to true
browser.download.panel.firstSessionCompleted is set to true (with bold)
browser.download.panel.shown is set to true (with bold)
When changing browser.download.panel.shown to false (it goes off bold), trying to download the picture from main Google site actually shows download panel. However, this setting then changes automatically back to true (with bold).
Expected results:
Download panel should automatically open when download is initiated...
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Comment 1•2 years ago
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Can you clarify which method or interface you're using to start the download? There are several contexts where the panel does not automatically open. They were added in bug 1739348, bug 1759231, and bug 1761265. For example, when an extension automatically generates a download without user interaction, or when the user clicks "Save Page As..." from a context menu.
When the user has downloads set to "Always Ask" what to do with them or to "Always ask you where to save files," Firefox will open a prompt (either a dialog asking you to open or save the file; or a "Save As" prompt). So if the download process already opened one of those prompts, it will not also open the downloads panel, to avoid any further interruption.
The panel won't open again if there's already a file downloading in the panel when another download is initiated. So it'll only open on download start if there are no other downloads listed in the panel or all the existing downloads in the panel are finished/stopped. It will also check that the Firefox window is actually active. So if you have some other window focused, Firefox will show an animation on the downloads button instead of opening the panel.
What the alwaysOpenPanel pref technically does is to toggle between 1) only opening the downloads panel once, for the first download in a Firefox session (this is the old pre-98 release behavior); or 2) opening the downloads panel for each download, not just the first download. But in either case, the panel will still be prevented from showing in the circumstances I mentioned.
So, there is not currently a preference you can toggle that will remove all those checks and basically show the downloads panel when a download starts, under any circumstances. I suppose it would be pretty easy to add such a pref, but it might cause some nuisances if you use extensions that store data locally with the downloads API.
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Comment 2•2 years ago
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Yes. I am starting the download by rightlicking on the picture and selecting "Save Image As..." from the context menu. No other download is occuring at the moment and the Firefox is the window with the focus.
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Comment 3•2 years ago
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(In reply to Martin Hudec from comment #2)
Yes. I am starting the download by rightlicking on the picture and selecting "Save Image As..." from the context menu. No other download is occuring at the moment and the Firefox is the window with the focus.
Okay cool. That behavior was added by bug 1761265
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Comment 4•2 years ago
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This was a deliberate change in bug 1761265 because people complained about the panel showing up automatically for explicitly user-initiated downloads. I guess it just goes to show there's no way to please everybody. :-\
I don't think we're likely to revert this, at least not for the moment.
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Comment 5•2 years ago
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So the behavior in e.g. Firefox 102.0.1 was actually a wrong one (that it had shown the panel even for user initiated downloads). Well, OK. Thank you for the explanation.
Though it would be nice to have this behavior configurable... (e.g. it is easier for me to see if the download has downloaded the file properly or some 20 bytes something in case of some issue when the panel pops up, but if it does not, I have to either click on it or use ctrl+j to get it).
Description
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