How to stop Firefox showing the downloads window every time you save a file
Published at: Mar 14, 2022
Starting with Firefox 98 (Released in March 2022), the default behaviour in Firefox is to now display the Downloads panel every single time you save a file to your computer.
A lot of people - myself included - find this incredibly annoying, so here's how to stop the downloads pop-out window appearing every time you save a file.
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Visit the Advanced Configuration url
In the address bar, type in about:config and press enter. You do not need to put in http:// or www or anything like that; simply put about:config and press the Enter key on your keyboard.
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Search for the browser.download.alwaysOpenPanel preference
The browser.download.alwaysOpenPanel setting will be true, because this is Firefox's new default setting. This is the preference we're going to change to stop the downloads panel appearing every time.
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Toggle the preference to "false"
Either double click anywhere on the browser.download.alwaysOpenPanel line, or click the
Toggle button to change it from true to false.
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Close the settings tab
Once you have finished fixing Firefox's settings, simply close the Advanced Preferences tab and continue browsing the internet with less distractions.
The Mozilla Developers
A lot of people have raised this as an issue on the Mozilla Developers forums and other online discussion sites, so hopefully this will be switched off by default in the future.
Read our other Firefox guides
Here's how to change settings in Firefox.
