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How do I change FireFox to highlight "save as" by default on the download dialogue menu?

  • 9 replies
  • 8 have this problem
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  • Last reply by bobn42855

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Right now I have FF setup to bring up the download dialog when clicking any download link basically. However it always selects "open with" as the default highlighted option. I have to manually click "save to" each and every time. How do I adjust it so it highlights "save to" initially?

Thanks.

Right now I have FF setup to bring up the download dialog when clicking any download link basically. However it always selects "open with" as the default highlighted option. I have to manually click "save to" each and every time. How do I adjust it so it highlights "save to" initially? Thanks.

Modified by MarkC9

All Replies (9)

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If the save setting is selected then that probably means that Firefox isn't able to locate a program that can handle this file.

With kind of files do you see this?

Is there a MIME (content) type mentioned in the Open with dialog?

You can attach a screenshot to show this.

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Thanks for the reply, though I think you've misunderstood.

My problem is that the default highlighted option is "open with". I want the default highlighted option to be "save as".

Modified by MarkC9

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Thanks for the reply, though I think you've misunderstood.

My problem is that the default highlighted option is "open with". I want the default highlighted option to be "save as".

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Sorry.

Doesn't Firefox remember a previous choice about saving a specific file type (extension) if you have chosen to save a file?

You can delete the mimeTypes.rdf file in the Firefox profile folder to reset all file actions.

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Will do.

I have OpenDownload as well installed: https://addons.mozilla.org/En-us/firefox/addon/opendownload-10902/ Could this be a culprit possibly?

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You can test this by disabling this extension

Did you check the options of that extension?

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You can change the default action for each file type from Options > Applications. You can set the action to always ask or to save file.

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OP, I know exactly what you're talking about. The situation is very simple. Everywhere I've searched for this, responders get way off into totally irrelevant discussion. The fact is that the download dialog used to always initially have the "save to" button selected. At some point a FF update changed that so that now the "open with" radio button is always selected. I also want to know how to get it back to defaulting to having the "save to" button selected.

What we want has nothing to do with what causes the download dialog box to come up. The fact that it does is what I want because I specified under Applications in Options that I want it to always ask for that type. Everything is working just the way I want it to except for the fact that when the dialog box does display (as I want), the "open with" radio button is already selected rather than the "save as" and it used to be the other way around.

So ... does anyone know if there is a way to change which one of those radio buttons is pre-selected when the download dialog box comes up? There is either an option or it is a hard-coded "enhancement" that I wish they would undo.

To me, if you want "open with" for a type, you would not specify to "always ask" for that type and have to go through the dialog box, you'd just set the type to be opened by the desired application under Applications. I would just select "save file" for a type I know I'm always going to want to save and bypass the download dialog but I want to see the name and size of the file that's going to be saved before deciding to do so.

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Addendum to my above post (hate it when I'm wrong): I must say that I normally don't have any archive file types (zip, rar, etc.) associated with any program. I prefer to right-click them and choose Haozip to unpack. I just noticed that apparently when I updated Haozip recently, it associated itself with all archive type files it handles including the types which are what I am normally downloading (those along with other file types that I also don't have associated with any program). So, now I see that when the download dialog comes up, if the file type being downloaded has a program associated with it, the "open with" is pre-selected. Otherwise, "save as" is selected. So ... FF may have always worked this way but it hasn't been a problem for me because I don't (purposefully) have the file types I'm downloading associated with any program. I could see this still being an issue for someone downloading, for example, mp3's where you would want to have the type associated with a player but want the default dialog box selection to be "save as" rather than "open with".

Modified by bobn42855