180510 - Mozilla downloads to a temporary file which is moved, why?

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 129923

(SeaMonkey :: Download & File Handling, enhancement)

Description

[Jonas Bofjall]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.2b) Gecko/20021029 Phoenix/0.4
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.2b) Gecko/20021029 Phoenix/0.4

I file this bug report because of a discussion we had on a forum. When
downloading a file, Mozilla's behaviour is to download it to a temporary
location, only to later move (or is it copy?) it to the directory decided on.
Many of us agreed that this is unnecessary complex, error-prone (what if the
temporary directory becomes full?) and counter-intuitive.

The intuitive behaviour would be to start downloading the file directly to the
directory specified (either not starting until the directory is specified, or
immediately moving it there after the file save dialog). This would also make it
easier to resume an interrupted transfer.

I couldn't find any answers to why Mozilla does this, and neither any bug
reports, so I filed one. Please refer to where this is discussed or any other
bug reports were this is filed.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:

Comment 1

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

There are only a few hundred bug reports on this... see bug 129923 and its
various dependencies, in particular bug  55690 which contains more of the useful
discussion than any of the other bugs..

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 129923 ***