1828169 - FF creates a system Downloads folder, even when a custom downloads folder has been specified.

Status: NEW

(Firefox :: Settings UI, defect, P3)

Description

[Eric Toombs]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:109.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/112.0

Steps to reproduce:

0. New profile.
1. Change the default download directory to a custom folder, call it ~/f.
2. Close firefox.
3. Delete ~/Downloads, because firefox makes it without asking me. Well, fine. It was the default.
4. Start firefox.

Actual results:

~/Downloads is recreated.

Expected results:

Nothing. I told it to use ~/f !!

Comment 1

[Eric Toombs]

(In reply to Eric Toombs from comment #0)

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:109.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/112.0

Steps to reproduce:

-1. I should add, ensure there is no ~/Downloads.

0. New profile.
1. Change the default download directory to a custom folder, call it ~/f.
2. Close firefox.
3. Delete ~/Downloads, because firefox makes it without asking me. Well, fine. It was the default.
4. Start firefox.

Actual results:

~/Downloads is recreated.

Expected results:

Nothing. I told it to use ~/f !!

Comment 2

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

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

Comment 3

[Eric Toombs]

Attachment: Bug 1828169 - Do not make system Downloads directories when a custom download directory has been specified. r?mconley

Comment 4

[Eric Toombs]

(In reply to Eric Toombs from comment #1)

(In reply to Eric Toombs from comment #0)

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:109.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/112.0

Steps to reproduce:

-1. I should add, ensure there is no ~/Downloads.

0. New profile.
1. Change the default download directory to a custom folder, call it ~/f.
2. Close firefox.
3. Delete ~/Downloads, because firefox makes it without asking me. Well, fine. It was the default.
4. Start firefox.

5. Open the settings.

Actual results:

~/Downloads is recreated.

Expected results:

Nothing. I told it to use ~/f !!

Sorry, I missed a critical step in the reproduction procedure. This and the fix I submitted to phab should make more sense now.

Comment 5

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

The bug assignee is inactive on Bugzilla, so the assignee is being reset.

Comment 7

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

Reposting my comment from the dupe:

getSystemDownloadsDirectory creates a Downloads directory under Home if DfltDwnld is not set in the DirectoryService, that ends up in https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/rev/a44891c52387ca4bd7c35b50f0d335f3980ef36a/xpcom/io/nsDirectoryService.cpp#423 that asks for Unix_XDG_Download that is apparently not set on your system.

There's various calls to getSystemDownloadsDirectory, and I suspect it's a requirement to have a default system downloads directory, as a fallback.
It may be possible to change the code to avoid creating the folder unless it's strictly necessary, though that's not a high priority considered it's a minor annoyance in most cases.

The code still uses browser.download.folderList that comes from time where the Preferences ui was showing a dropdown list, it could probably be cleaned up, but I'm not sure if it could be avoided completely.