[D Graber]

D Graber

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Yesterday (Sat, April 5), I “upgraded” my Firefox browser from version 21.0 to the latest version 28.0, and suddenly my downloading destination choice was crippled. When I selected the “Ask me for a download destination for each download attempt” (not the exact words), any download simply failed to happen. When I selected the default download destination (called “Downloads”), I tried the “Browse” button so I could choose a download destination that made sense for my filing system. Didn’t work. The “Browse” button is frozen, and I’m stuck with the mystery “Downloads” destination.

So to find out if (and if so, how) that worked, I tried a download of a small file with a known filename. Once the download was attempted, I ran a hard drive search for that filename to see where (and if) it landed. The result was that the download landed here:

C:Documents and SettingsAdministratorMy DocumentsDownloads

from which I could copy/move it to some properly labeled folder in my hard drive filing system.

A real problem arises when you have to download a file whose name you can’t see, or whose name you didn’t know to write down so that you would know what filename to search for to learn of that bug-coded download destination that I had to find the hard way.

It might be a few months before Mozilla gets this mess straightened out. They thought they had a fix for version 27.0, but didn?t. They think they have a fix for a beta version of 28.0 (which I don?t have access to). Clearly the problem has been ongoing since January 2014 with no across-the-board fix, per this ongoing Mozilla bug forum on the problem:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=958899

I’m having the same problem the guy is reporting with his French language version, and my results make it clear that Mozilla’s belief that version 28 is fixed is not yet true, regardless of their success with beta versions I don’t have.

So, there are several solutions until Mozilla gets their act together:

1. Suck it up and live with copying all your downloads from version 28.0?s hard-coded bug location to someplace sensible.

2. Do your downloads from some other browser (not IE., its security problems are the stuff of legend) such as Opera, Iron (the privacy-enhanced tweak of Chrome, from srware.net) or PaleMoon (from palemoon.org — a Firefox-based spinoff that downloads and installs very quickly, and works very much like Firefox except for not cooperating with many of the Firefox add-ons [that we also call plug-ins]. There are, of course, lots of other lesser known browsers.

3. Save your Firefox profile info (in a single file) by not permitting it to be deleted when you use Control Panel?s ?Add or Remove Programs? feature to delete your buggy Firefox 27 or 28 version altogether, and replace it with the older version 21.0 (still available from Mozilla, and a few other places). I prefer downloads from the original source when possible, because there?s usually less, or no, unwanted 3rd party software to be fought off during the download and installation process.

4. If by chance, you wisely saved your earlier Firefox version’s download in a safe place (actually, that’s always a good idea for all software that doesn’t auto-install during its download — some software providers don’t keep earlier versions available, even if they should have), that would save you from chasing down a fresh download of your older correctly-working version.

Hope this helps,

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