Firefox Download Box, Controlling Your Annoying Friend.

A majority of my readers use Firefox to browse the web. I myself happen to be a big fan of Firefox, as some of my previous posts have indicated. Always striving for efficiency, I have made a few tweaks to lower my frustration and increase the enjoyment of my web browsing experience. Amongst these changes, one of the first things I do on a new install is to change the way the download dialog (ctrl+j) behaves.

To clarify, I don’t like the downloads box to pop-up when I start a download and I want to choose where to save my file. To achieve this, I go to Firefox options:

Firefox Options Menu

and select your options as noted below:

Firefox Download Options

To access the infamous download box in the future, use the ctrl+j hotkey combination:

Firefox Downloads Dialog

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5 comments so far

  1. Louie February 6, 2008 2:27 pm

    You might also want to consider installing the Download Statusbar plugin for Firefox. :)

  2. Tyler Mulligan February 6, 2008 2:31 pm

    I used to use download statusbar but (when I used it) it didn’t pay attention to the downloads dialog it hides but rather lets the files build up and cause a memory problem for Firefox after some time.

  3. Susanne F February 7, 2008 9:04 pm

    Thanks for the tip – I love my FF too but to have everything downloaded to my desktop almost drove me crazy.

  4. iCalvyn March 7, 2008 10:25 am

    this download really annoting me some time, always need to close it or clear it :(

  5. Aloha May 31, 2008 6:26 am

    FF always drove me nutz with this. I never looked for a solution until now. Thanks!

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