1866736 - Prompt not showing (although set in settings) where to store a file when a download is initiated, instead it downloads automatically

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Firefox :: File Handling, defect)

Description

[Viktor Wohlgefahrt]

Attachment: Screenshot of my checkmark setting

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:120.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/120.0

Steps to reproduce:

Downloading important Invoices from the sales platform cardmarket.de. Until 10:30 today in the morning it went well, but then my Firefox got updated to 120.0 and now it does not work as expected aymore.

Actual results:

Files where automatically dowloaded into Downloads Folder.

Expected results:

Prompt asking me where to download should have been shown, which worked until the update to 120.0, but no it doesn't, it went straight for the download.

Box is always checked, to show me the prompt in settings. I tried resetting it, and also closing and opening Firefox, logging in and out of the platform but nothing helped.

Comment 1

[BugBot [:suhaib / :marco]]

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

Comment 2

[Ardelean Oana, Desktop Test Engineering [:oardelean]]

Hello, thank you for the bug report!
Unfortunately I could not reproduce your issue. Would you be so kind as to answer a few questions so we can investigate this further?

• Does this issue happen with a new profile? Here is a link on how to create one: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-manager-create-remove-switch-firefox-profiles
• Does this issue happen with latest nightly? Here is a link from where you can download it: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/channel/desktop/
• Does this issue happen when Firefox is in Troubleshoot Mode? Here’s a link on how to enable it: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/diagnose-firefox-issues-using-troubleshoot-mode#w_how-to-start-firefox-in-troubleshoot-mode

Thank you.

Comment 3

[Viktor Wohlgefahrt]

Hi, so i've tried all suggested steps.

First i started to clean Firefox. Now the behaviour has changed. Although the checkmark is STILL set for asking for the download instead of downloading it, Firefox opens the PDF in its built in PDF Viewer, it is not getting downloaded to anywhere. The same behaviour is also happening in the troubleshooting Mode aswell as with the latest Version of Firefox that you have suggested me 121.0b5.

Comment 4

[Viktor Wohlgefahrt]

Addendum: It depends, where i download my PDF's from, on some platforms it also downloads them while opening them with the built in PDF Reader of Firefox, but it never asks me where to save it, which is the behaviour i would expect.

Comment 5

[BugBot [:suhaib / :marco]]

The severity field is not set for this bug.
:mak, could you have a look please?

For more information, please visit BugBot documentation.

Comment 6

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

This is the expected behavior in most cases, the Always ask you where to save files option is only a fallback in case a file type IS NOT known to Firefox, otherwise what matters is the Applications list just below it.
PDF is a file type Firefox can handle natively, thus it will try to open PDF files like it opens HTML.
And because to show the PDF it must first be stored somewhere, it is stored in the Downloads folder, so it won't be lost on close.

You can change what to do with PDF files , for example setting it to Always Ask, in the Applications list.
Though note then PDF won't open anymore in the Firefox PDF viewer by default, it will always ask you what to do, that may be annoying.

Alternatively You can also evaluate setting browser.download.start_downloads_in_tmp_dir in about:config to put the initial download in the temp folder instead of the Downloads folder. Then PDF will still open in Firefox and you can click the Download button on the PDF reader to permanently move the pdf to where you wish. But you must remember every time.

Finally, you could also just right click on the link and Save As (provided it's not some magic javascript "link").

Does this help?

Comment 7

[:Gijs (he/him)]

Without more information there's not much we can do inside Firefox, so I'm going to close this out - we can reopen if more info becomes available.