1815043 - [snap] Firefox doesn't remember download directory per site

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 1799381

(Core :: Widget: Gtk, defect)

Description

[Dan Dascalescu]

Attachment: Firefox keeps creting random directories for downloads.png

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:109.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/109.0

Steps to reproduce:

I receive statements from my broker as attachments in Gmail, and I want to save them to a specific directory. Previous versions of Firefox (don't recall exact which, but until about a month ago) would remember the directory, which made this process easy.

1. Find an email in Gmail with an attachment.
2. Download the attachment to a specific folder.
3. Download the same attachment again

Actual results:

Now Firefox keep creating a random temporary directory in an ugly location, even after I navigate to my desired directory in the KDE file picker but double clicking through the directory path.

Comment 1

[Dan Dascalescu]

Apparently the directory Firefox proposes is the temporary directory in which it has saved the last download, /run/user/1000/doc/[0-9a-f]{8}.

It also doesn't delete these temporary files, even after the downloads have completed (in the designated directories). This is a security risk.

Comment 2

[Simona Badau, Desktop QA]

Dan, is it possible that you might have saved the default saving location to that temporary directory at some point? You can check this by entering about:preferences in the address bar, and scrolling down to the Downloads section from Files and Applications.

In my case, after checking the box to "Always be asked where to save files" in about: preferences if I choose to save a file in a different location than the default one, the next download will also be done in that same location. - tried on Windows 10 using the latest Nightly 111.0a1 and Firefox 109.0.1.

I'm moving this to the Downloads Panel component, so that our developers could take a look over this issue.

Comment 3

[Dan Dascalescu]

Salut Simona,

That is definitely not the case - I would never configure such a weird directory for downloads. The download directory is set to ~/downloads.

Something else that might cause this is the fact that Firefox shipped with Kubuntu as a SNAP package.

Comment 4

[:Gijs (he/him)]

Yes, this is because of snap sandboxing, as I understand it. I don't know that there is much we can do about it on the Firefox frontend side because the program is not allowed to keep a path reference to an arbitrary folder on disk and then reuse that on the next start, or something. bug 1775497 looks related.

Comment 5

[:Gijs (he/him)]

Actually bug 1799381 is exactly this issue, so duping this over.