752440 - Downloads panel needs "queue to open when complete" behaviour

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 1711053

(Firefox :: Downloads Panel, enhancement)

Description

[Stephan Sokolow]

With pending downloads, Chrome has a very useful convenience feature where you can click a download that hasn't finished yet and the text will change to "Opening in [time remaining]".

In Firefox, I really miss this ability to pre-emptively ask the browser to open the download when it completes and I really think it's the one single way in which the new downloads panel doesn't already blow Chrome's downloads bar out of the water.

Comment 1

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

so basically, you want to be able to toggle on-the-fly between Save As and Open states for the download...
May be interesting, though would not exactly be discoverable (a context menu item may work better) and may change current default behavior of double click.
Confirming as enh, though may still become wontfix if either we don't want this kind of interaction or the complexity would better be handled by an add-on.

Comment 2

[Stephan Sokolow]

Not quite. 

When I choose "Open", I expect the browser to silently choose a temp folder without asking me and take responsibility for making sure the file gets deleted after I close the viewing app; When I choose "Save As", I want it to ask me for a location and then leave disposing of it to me.

Also, toggle would be an improvement over Chrome. If there's a simple way to hook "on completion of this specific download" as an event, you'd get chrome parity (and make me perfectly happy) just by making a pre-completion click handler that attaches a file-opening callback to the completion event, then detaches itself without making any provisions to undo that operation.

Comment 3

[liboff12346]

Frankly it is a pain that you can only choose between 
1)opening a download that is discarded after viewing (such downloads are no longer held in the temp folder) and therefore lost, requiring the download to be done again if you wish to view the file again.
and 
2)saving a download, which you then have to go and locate to open it.

There should be an option to save a download and open it in one action - either as a default behaviour, or explicitly.

Some of us found the ability to search through previously downloaded files easily a valuable feature - and also to be able to easily build a history of e.g. monthly statistics releases that could be checked back in history for revisions.

Downloads often take time to search out, and to actually download.  They're a valuable resource for some of us, which the present download management system is making much more difficult to manage.  Doing fresh downloads when you're paying for WiFi away from base is also potentially very expensive.

Comment 4

[Jonathan Watt [:jwatt]]

Mass bug change to replace various 'parity' whiteboard flags with the new canonical keywords. (See bug 1443764 comment 13.)