Your description indicates that the folders to which you are saving are anything but random. To reduce your headaches, I suggest a work around: change tools>options>general>downloads>save files to the desktop, and from the desktop, at your leisure, organize as you see fit. Alternatively, do the same but with a "downloads" folder rather than the desktop.

Thank you for the response! It seems to me the folders are random. For instance, I'll save a picture from site.com, into the folders 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5. When I later go back to site.com and attempt to save a picture, it will ask me to save in, say, folder 3. If I go back even later, it could be a different folder entirely. There doesn't really seem to be any method to it that I can see, since it's totally different every time.

Thank you also for the suggestion, but I often have days where I save hundreds of pictures, and spending that kind of time isn't really viable for me.

If there's really no way to turn off this behavior, which in my opinion would be great to be able to opt out of, I will simply downgrade to another version of Firefox.

Current Firefox versions remember the download directory based upon the URL, so if the URL changes then the default folder may be chosen if there hasn't been selected a download folder before for that server.

• [/questions/889958]
• [/questions/882443]

I have been frustrated by the same aggravating Firefox 8 "improvement". I have several hard drives, several partitions on each hard drive, hundreds of folders on in each partition, and hundreds of subfolders below them. When I am researching something, I download whole Web pages, PDFs, JPEGs, FLVs, and many other files from all over the Web. It is totally frustrating to be taken to different drives all over my computer each time I want to download a new file to the same folder I jut downloaded to. I have to drill up and down drives and folders to get back to where I was.

In previous versions of Firefox, Save As opened in the last folder I saved to, and all I had to do was create a file name and hit Save. In Firefox 8 I am taken to some totally unrelated subfolder on some totally unrelated drive. The folder in which I last downloaded a file from Wikipedia, Fox News, BBC , Flicker, or any other URL usually has absolutely nothing to do with what I am presently researching.

Why would anyone want to make the default download be the desktop? Total clutter and confusion. All I want Firefox to do when I hit the Save As button is to open the same folder I last downloaded anything to irregardless of the URL.

Is there some way via modifying the about:config file that I can change this behavior of Firefox 8?

Firefox11 is still doing this (not saving things to the same folder) and when u have 4 hard drives u save different things on it is a pain.

There is now a workaround, see my summary in another thread and a solution posted by cor-el you need to create and use a preference browser.download.lastDir.savePerSite

John99, would come on my computer and fix this. I am old enough to not understand any of this.

Create a new Boolean pref with the name browser.download.lastDir.savePerSite and set the value to false.
You may have the clear the "Site Preferences" via Clear Recent History to remove already stored data.

• Tools > Options > Privacy : History: [X] Clear history when Firefox closes > Settings
• https://support.mozilla.org/kb/Clear+Recent+History

To open the about:config page, type about:config in the location (address) bar and press the "Enter" key, just like you type the url of a website to open a website.
If you see a warning then you can confirm that you want to access the about:config page.

• http://kb.mozillazine.org/about:config

In version 11, adding the entry to about:config on Windows XP seemed to solve the problem.

I am now using version 12 on Windows 7 Pro, 64-bit and the problem remains even with the browser.download.lastDir.savePerSite entry set to false!

By the way, I've also done "clear recent history" and selected "everything" and checked all the boxes. After a while, Firefox 12 still randomly changes the save as folder to some previously used location. This causes files to be placed in random folders all over the 8 TB of storage I have. This computer has almost 2 million files so it is totally unacceptable to be re-organizing them due to erroneous Firefox behavior! When I enter a save as folder, Firefox MUST continue to use that folder and only that folder until I tell it specifically to use a different one. I am the user - I know what I am doing and Firefox is a tool that MUST DO WHAT I WANT!!!!!!

Hi Yaggle,
I realise this is not the sort of reply you are hoping for but my personal opinion is

If the problem does come and go as an intermittent problem, and only after prolonged use of Firefox it is not going to be very easy to make progress on this, but maybe you would like to take some steps to demonstrate it reproducibly so that developers may be in a position to consider it.

IF you are certain Firefox is not behaving in the same way as Firefox 11 in relation to saving files. Then I am guessing it is either

1. Your setup,
   because you have not successfully set the preference, or some third party software or extension is interfering
2. A genuine regression
   it is unlikely something has been inadvertently changed and not yet noticed (I have not trawled through bug reports to see if anything has been reported, or deliberately changed further) but that is possible.

If you consider this is important and wish to take it further I suggest you start your own thread and investigate the above possibilities further, (post back in this thread if you do start another thread, as readers of this thread may be interested in your investigation).

If it is a regression of behaviour then in order to be able to successfully file a bug report it would be helpful to be able to reproducibly demonstrate this behaviour in the latest firefox version whilst in safe mode and with no plugins enabled. Whilst able to demonstrate the correct behaviour in the older Firefox.

I realise you are aware of and have already posted in the long discussion thread which did include a demonstration of the problem /questions/882443?page=2#answer-265188 Are you able to use that or something similar to demonstrate a problem does occur.

Good morning John, thanks for the reply. Problem is easily reproduced using same steps as in questions/883443 -- here are steps with Firefox 12:

1. Use Windows Explorer to create two folders: c:/temp/dogs and c:/temp/cats

2. go to wii.no/tmp/dog1.jpg cntrl-s, select dogs folder, save

3. go to xen.no/tmp/cat1.jpg cntrl-s, select cats folder, save

4. go to wii.no/tmp/cat2.jpg cntrl-s and save as folder is dogs, NOT cats

5. go to about:config copy and paste following entries

browser.download.lastDir.savePerSite;false

browser.download.lastDir;C:\Temp\cats

The download.lastDir value is correct, but the save as folder is wrong!

6. While still viewing about:config, select file, save page as, note the save as folder is cats, save file as about.config.xul

I tried to upload the about.config.xul file with this entry but it fails since it's not an image. Next reply will do same steps in safe mode.

7. Now restart Firefox with Add-ons disabled, Firefox now restarts in safe mode.

8. Select Tools, Clear Recent History, set Time range to Everything, check all boxes including Site Preferences, Clear Now

9. go to wii.no/tmp/dog1.jpg cntrl-s (save as folder is still cats), select dogs folder, re-save file

10. go to xen.no/tmp/cat1.jpg cntrl-s, select cats folder, re-save file

11. go to wii.no/tmp/cat2.jpg cntrl-s and save as folder is dogs, NOT cats as it should be, save and verify file actually was saved in dogs folder instead of cats.

There you go, problem easily reproduced in safe mode with no plug-ins, add-ons, etc. and with all history erased.

Thanks for the info Yaggle. I will try it myself when I have the time next week. Possibly it is a regression, if so it will be worth filing a bug and hopefully the developers will look into it and fix it.

Now for the coup de grace - I noticed that others having the same problem with Firefox 12 are also running Windows 7 Pro, 64-bit. I have a laptop running Windows 7 Pro, 32-bit. I updated it with Firefox 12 and did the same steps 1 through 4. It works properly - cats go in the cats folder and dogs in the dogs folder.

I decided to try one more experiment with Ubuntu 12.04 and Firefox 12. At first it had the same problem but when checking the about:config file I noticed the browser.download.lastDir.savePerSite entry was a string set to false instead of a boolean set to false. When I changed it (not easy by the way - had to manually edit the prefs.js file in my home directory) the behavior is correct. Good news.

Now I went back to my Windows 7, 64-bit machine and lo and behold, it was also set to a string instead of a boolean. I fixed it and now this machine works properly as well. So, looks like cockpit error after all - mea culpa

Note that when you do a copy and paste from about:config to one of these posts, the string false looks exactly the same as a boolean false so none of you could see the error. Hopefully others having this problem will find their about:config file has a string value instead of a boolean value.

Thank you to everyone who helped with this issue - it appears solved for me.

Well done Yaggle,
saved me having to try reproducing the problem when looking for an answer.

I am not sure the change and the fix were the smartest thing Mozilla Firefox have ever done, but at least it seems there is a usable workaround. Thanks for posting back with the update.

(Is the default correct ??)

I managed R&D engineers (both hardware and software) for many years so I appreciate what's involved with developing and maintaining programs like Firefox.

The default is not correct in my opinion. Each user must add the boolean entry browser.download.lastDir.savePerSite and set it to false. Without this entry, Firefox changes the save as folder to suit itself not what the user typically needs. While the about:config method is clever, it is not at all intuitive for most users. The default behavior should be changed so that only the minority of users who want the savePerSite behavior have to modify the entry. The entry should always be in the file which would have prevented my error. Then all the user has to do is change the boolean value to suit their needs.