Firefox allows webpage to change my about:config
Just recently, faxtone.com started popping open the downloads panel every time I save a file from there. When I traced it down... I found it hard to believe, but Firefox is allowing it to change my browser.downloads.panel.shown flag to true. This happens no matter how many times I change it back to false, and it doesn't help to make sure that browser.downloads.alwaysOpenPanel and browser.downloads.improvements_to_download_panel are false.
Does anyone know of a flag that forbids webpages from making changes to about:config?
(It also allowed the webpage to change browser.downloads.lastDir to Desktop. Thankfully it only did that the one time, and hasn't done it again since I set it to match my browser.downloads.dir, but it's still really disturbing behavior.)
Alle svar (6)
browser.downloads.panel.shown is merely a pref that shows that you have at least once seen the download panel (you may see an explaining message the very first time you open this panel) and there is no need to worry about it.
You should be cautious with arbitrarily changing prefs you do not understand what they are used for on the about:config page as that can cause issues.
The problem remains. I didn't make the change that caused the downloads panel to start appearing, and there appears to be no way to turn it off despite following multiple advisories on how to do so.
Leaving browser.downloads.improvements_to_download_panel at its default value of true and only setting browser.downloads.alwaysOpenPanel to false should be sufficient to prevent Firefox from opening the download panel automatically each time you start a download.
In a future Firefox version you might be able to control browser.downloads.alwaysOpenPanel via the context menu in the download panel.
That wasn't it either. I have no explanation for why the behavior began (before you assert otherwise, yes it began before I made any changes) -- but it appears that at this point the magical configuration is to leave browser.downloads.alwaysOpenPanel and browser.downloads.improvements_to_download_panel both false and let browser.downloads.panel.shown remain true. (Setting it to false makes it open the download panel.)
Odd that Firefox would chastise us for dorking around with prefs when it starts acting up, when Firefox's ongoing modifications and the strange behavior of various combinations makes it necessary.
I'm having the same problem as the original post, however not caused by a site changing my configurations.
After the latest update any time I save a file from any site the downloads panel opens. As someone who downloads a lot of stuff, this behavior is very obnoxious.
I tried setting browser.downloads.alwaysOpenPanel and browser.downloads.improvements_to_download_panel to false, and browser.downloads.panel.shown to true like suggested, but the behavior is still the same on my end.
@elburno3593, you could try creating a new profile. If that works, you can transfer data from the old profile to the new after exiting the browser. You will have to reinstall add-ons. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-manager-create-remove-switch-firefox-profiles https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/recovering-important-data-from-an-old-profile https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profiles-where-firefox-stores-user-data