Getting Firefox to Use Leopard’s Download Stack
Find your downloads quickly in one dedicated stack. Downloads from Safari, iChat, and Mail are automatically saved to the Downloads stack. Say goodbye to desktop clutter.
… says Apple’s “new feature” description for Mac OS X Leopard. What it doesn’t mention is that you can make (almost) any software you like use the “Download Stack”.
Fact is, the “Download Stack” just displays the contents of a folder named “Download” in your home directory (which Leopard automatically creates). So, making Firefox use it is fairly simple — here is how:
Go to the preferences window, into the “Main” tab:
Under “save files to”, go to your user folder, then choose the folder named “Downloads”.
Save the settings — and next time you download something off the net, you’ll see that it is easily (and instantly) accessible through the neat little “Download Stack” in your dock (in this case my local bus schedule. What a meaningful file name.).
“Goodbye, desktop clutter”, indeed!
This doesn’t work in 2.0.0.8.
See bug 384068.
It should be noted that we are working hard to get that working that way by default in 2.0.0.8 and on trunk.
I filed the bug to get the default download location changed. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=384068 This should make it into Firefox 3, hopefully soon
Thanks for the comments, guys. Yes, this is Minefield, and of course having it as the default would make a lot of sense!
Hmmm… Am I missing something or is this not completely obvious? Or is it just me because I have already had my Firefox save new downloads into the “Downloads” directory for the past years?
Well — the new part here is that for OSX Leopard it actually makes a ton of sense to do that because it gives you a thing called “stacks” in the dock (Some screenshots). So if you keep dumping downloads on the Desktop, you don’t make use of that.
Before, it was mainly a matter of personal taste where you put your downloads.
Yes, yes. I’ve been using Leopard since Saturday already and have even figured out how to use stacks.
However, I completely fail to understand the things that are being said about “saving to the download stack”. This is just a directory after all, not some kind of black magic, or is it?
Yes, precisely so. (Much like you’d expect from Unix, everything is a file
)
This isn’t working for me. I’ve changed the download location within Firefox 2.0.0.9 to Downloads, but it still dumps files I open directly from email attachments (rather than choosing ‘Save to File’) onto the desktop.
Any idea why?
Sam, did you check out the bug mentioned in the comments #1 and 2? I think there was a problem in Firefox 2 preventing this?
Sam: Actually, I can confirm this behavior on Minefield (Firefox 3 Alpha) here! I set the download location to the Downloads folder and when I actually download a file this is where it ends up, but if I choose “open with” some application, the file is still dropped onto the Desktop before opening.
Thanks for pointing this out! I commented on bug 384068 to see if this is the same bug or if I need to file a new one. In any case, I’ll comment here again when I know more.
Hi Fred, Sam,
I am also experiencing the bug. Helper app temporary files are saved to the Desktop, not the chosen download directory. This was not the case in Tiger.
The bug seems to be present in 2.0.0.9 and the latest nightly.
Please go ahead and make the Firefox developers aware.
Interesting. And having checked, it DOESN’T happen using Safari…
Thanks.
What doesn’t happen using Safari?
As in, when you download a file (in this case, a webmail attachment), it doesn’t place it on the desktop, but puts it in the download stack, as it should.
S
Thanks for the clarification — though it is pretty obvious that Apple’s own browser behaves the way Apple designed it to behave
Hi guys, I am having EXACTLY the same problem.
Anything i download just goes to the desktop!
I may just end up using my old download location instead!
I posted about this issue a while back on my blog. Please have a look at:
http://www.hskupin.info/2007/03/11/temporare-dateien-bei-firefoxthunderbird-unter-mac-os-x/
I’m sorry that it is in German but you only have to set the mentioned prefs. There is also a link to a bug report. That helped me a lot in getting the desktop clean!
Thanks, Henrik! This reminds me, didn’t we want to meet for delectable dining hall food once?
This seems to work partially. The temp files do get deleted on shutdown, however, their download location remains the desktop.
Handy hint though!
Fred, indeed! But let us wait until December. We can meet up at the christmas market.
Dan, sorry that was only the half information. You have to open Safari and change under the general settings the download location. Normally it should be set to your desktop.
Thanks Hendrik, but that doesn’t work for me. Changing the Safari Download directory doesn’t change Firefox’s behaviour at all. Still temporary files are always saved to Desktop. This is the case for both 2.0.0.9 and the recent 3.0 alphas. Any ideas?
Sorry, no idea. It’s still working for me here with 2.0.0.10pre and my debug trunk build. The last thing I can think of you should test with a fresh profile.
dan: The behavior is the same as you describe for me here on OSX Leopard, so Henrik’s workaround may not work for the new version anymore. IIRC, there’s an open bug for Minefield to change the temp folder to the download folder too.
Henrik: Christmas market? Now we’re talking!
In hindsight, this was sort of obvious, but I still needed to Google to figure it out. Thanks for the post!
You’re very welcome — always glad to help
I’ve tried changing all related about:config settings for download as well as for the helperApp, but Firefox still doesn’t react to changes to either its download folder or to the safari download folder, and it won’t give me a save to dialouge. The only way I can download anything is by right-clicking. This just started when i upgraded to Leopard. Is there a fix? I’m running 2.0.0.8 at the moment.
I was having this same problem but finally fixed it with a post I found on the Apple Discussion Forums:
Try this!
Go to User/Library/Preferences and delete com.apple.internetconfig.plist (you can save it on your desktop if you want to replace it). Restart Firefox and test it.
it worked for me.
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=5666281�
Worked for me too. Great tip! Now I can use Firefox again. Yay!
Maybe someone should notify the Firefox dev team of this fix.
[…] is a real pain. It’s cool if you’ve only got a couple of items in it, but if you use Firefox or like me have 30+ items in it that need to be filed, looked at or deleted, it’s hard to […]
I accidentally deleted the downloads stack… how do i get it back?
That’s not very hard: Open the Finder, go to your home directory, then click and hold the “Downloads” folder that’s in there, drag it onto the dock, and let it drop. This creates a stack.
I found the solution to this by changing the download setting in CAMINO (another mozilla browser).
Download camino, open preferences, set “Save downloaded files to: Downloads”
It works.