445075 - No UI for missing default download directory

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 429827

(Toolkit :: Downloads API, defect)

Description

[JoSH Lehan]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.0.1) Gecko/2008070206 Firefox/3.0.1
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.0.1) Gecko/2008070206 Firefox/3.0.1

Firefox has no UI for the error in which the default download directory is missing or otherwise unusable.

Downloads won't begin.  Nothing will appear in the Download Manager window.  Any previous contents of Download Manager will be left unchanged.  No dialog box will pop up, asking the user where to save the file.  Nothing visible happens, at all.

So, the user is left wondering what's wrong with their network, when in fact it was the download directory folder location that was in error.

This may seem like a contrived situation, but with today's removable USB drives and such, this happens more often.


Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Set Firefox default download folder to something that was valid at the time but is no longer valid, such as a drive letter that used to be occupied by a USB drive that has since been removed.
2. Try to download a file with Firefox.
3. Observe no UI appears at all, but your download has failed.  The file isn't downloaded anywhere.
Actual Results:  
See above.

Expected Results:  
If the user begins a download, and the default download directory is missing or otherwise inaccessible, I would expect that Firefox would pop up a "Save As" dialog box.  The user can then navigate to a good directory, and continue to save the file from there.


I'm reporting this bug running a Firefox that runs on Linux, but I've also observed the bug happens on Windows.  In fact, because Windows frequently re-uses drive letters as media is changed, it's more common.

Comment 1

[Roberto Zingales]

I confirm this bug, in firefox 3.01 , italian version, under windows xp 32 bit.
I had set the default folder to a removable device.... which I removed after some time.
after then... any download, any attempt to save anything went just "wrong", without any alert to the user.

then I set the download folder to an existing one ( the removable disk was gone!), and now firefox dave everything fine.

when chosing a download folder, firefox checks for the existence of the destination folder.
yet if a folder existed at that time but it's removed or blocked after some time, firefox no longer checks it's existence and doesnt' issue any alert message to the user.