982738 - Find a better solution for the downloads dialog

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Firefox :: Downloads Panel, enhancement)

Description

[(Currently slow to respond) Philipp Sackl [:phlsa] (Firefox UX) please use needinfo]

Currently, our downloads dialog looks like this: http://is.gd/OuEbKC

This approach has a couple of problems:
- The window requires more clicks than necessary when not choosing the pre-selected action.
- The fact that it is a window means that it can get lost behind other windows and is hard to recover.
- There is too little contrast in the content.

Off the bat, I can think of three approaches:
1) Integrate the dialog with the downloads panel (initial wireframe: http://cl.ly/image/0N0G1h1K041C)
2) Use one of our new tab modal dialogs to display it (example dialog: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/attachment.cgi?id=8385370)
3) Get rid of the dialog all together and just download files. Safari, Chrome and Opera are doing this right now.

Comment 1

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

Do you have General / Downloads set to "Always ask me where to save files"? That's not the default fwiw.

Comment 2

[(Currently slow to respond) Philipp Sackl [:phlsa] (Firefox UX) please use needinfo]

(In reply to Marco Bonardo [:mak] from comment #1)
> Do you have General / Downloads set to "Always ask me where to save files"?
> That's not the default fwiw.

No, it's set to always save files to my downloads folder.
At least on Mac, that doesn't keep Firefox from displaying those dialogs.

Comment 4

[Gingerbread Man]

(In reply to Marco Bonardo [:mak] from comment #1)

Do you have General / Downloads set to "Always ask me where to save files"?

Bug 453455 is so commonplace that in practice that setting rarely matters.

Comment 5

[:Gijs (he/him)]

By default we don't show this dialog anymore.