388783 - User's Desktop is locked, therefore he cannot download files from Internet. Why use Desktop as temp location?

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Toolkit :: Downloads API, defect)

Description

[Ryan]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X; en-US; rv:1.8.1.5) Gecko/20070713 Firefox/2.0.0.5
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X; en-US; rv:1.8.1.5) Gecko/20070713 Firefox/2.0.0.5

At my company, we lock all users' Desktops to prevent them from going to do a presentation for a client and having a photo of their dog/cat/vacation in Florida, etc...on their Desktop.  We set a Downloads directory on the machines and Safari doesn't have any problem downloading to this location.

Because the /Users/[user]/Desktop is locked, no one can download files from the Internet because Firefox wants to write a temporary file to the Desktop.  Even if you set the download location to the correct location, it still tries to use the Desktop to write a temporary file.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.  Set your Desktop to Read-Only or No Access
2.  Create a Downloads folder inside your Documents folder
3.  Set your Download location in Firefox to ~/Documents/Downloads
4.  Go to http://www.apple.com/server/documentation and try downloading any of the PDFs.  You will see the error.
Actual Results:  
"/Users/test/Desktop/6auevpku.pdf could not be saved because you cannot change the contents of that folder.

Change the folder properties and try again, or try saving in a different location."

Expected Results:  
A pop-up dialog box asking whether to open the file or save it.

In certain instances, a user can Right/Control-Click on a file to download and choose "Save Link As".  At that point, they are prompted for the download location and can choose the Downloads folder that we have set up for them.

However, there are certain instances when using a web-based application, the clicking of a button invokes a script to pull data from a DB in a PDF format, and download the PDF to the user's station.  Right/Control-clicking is not an option in circumstances such as that.  Unfortunately, one of our most commonly used applications functions this way.

Comment 1

[Jo Hermans]

see bug 371608

Comment 2

[Shawn Wilsher :sdwilsh]

Resolving old UNCONFIRMED Download Manager bugs as INCOMPLETE.  If you still see this issue, please reopen.

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