Firefox Community Forum

I teach an online Adobe Illustrator Course. Students upload (.ai) Adobe Illustrator files. Not .svg or .pdf. But Firefox changes the (.ai) extension to (.pdf) upon downloading. This is HIGHLY irritating. Firefox, in prior versions, did not do this. In Firefox settings for Applications, there isn't a choice for .ai (Adobe Illustrator) files. I 'assume' that when AI (artificial intelligence) became available is when Firefox began automatically changing (.ai) files to (.pdf). PLEASE SOLVE this as I have to manually change the (.pdf) extension BACK to (.ai) HUNDREDS of times a day.

Professor Brian Sauriol

This setting, "Always ask you where to save files," is definitely broken.

In a related article, they provided this solution: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/que.../1534384 https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1534384]

Proposed solution: "I believe you also need to go into Tools -> Settings -> General and set the Action for the types of downloads (Applications) to Always Ask for those types you want it to."

But this workaround should not be needed. "Always ask" means always ask. As in always. No other additional steps should be needed.

Can you folks please open a bug to get this fixed? This used to work just fine in (much) older versions of Firefox and Netscape. "Always ask" is supposed to mean always ask. Like, always.

How can I get Firefox to stop automatically downloading links? I've selected the "ask me" option in settings and that doesn't stop it. In the past it worked fine but for the last several months I've tried everything and it won't ask me what file to put it in. Now, every PDF gets automatically sent to my Adobe cloud (which I definitely don't want as I'm planning to ditch Adobe at the end of my current subscription) and I have to go through a convoluted work around to even be able to get it downloaded into the file where I need it to be. Can you please help? Thank you! ~ JTucker

I would like to be able set a keyboard shortcut to automatically toggle the option "always ask you where to save files" on and off. At times, I am downloading a lot of pdf files from the Internet and these can all go into the downloads folder. However, I also need to frequently download pdf files and customize them before the download.

Hi, I've recently discovered that Firefox replaces the % with underscore while downloading file.

I've read that question: https://support.mozilla.org/fr/questions/1439267 but there is no answer.

Is there a way to prevent that? I use a online tool I've made myself and the % is used as a separator.

Using Firevox 142.0.1 on a MacBook Air. I always have "Always ask you where to save files" checked in Preferences, but lately it sometimes fails to ask me. For example, if I try to download a file from Google Drive. Is anyone else having this problem? Is there something I can do about it?

Windows 11: I have file download setting set to: "always ask where to save". I choose the location and folder when the save file box opens. The document is saved in the location I chose BUT it also saves to the desktop. How do I stop a duplicate download from saving to the desktop?

Thank you

Hi. I'd like to know that there is a way to stop download torrent files and just let my torrent client /qbittorrent/ handle it. Even after i set it to open them with qbittorrent Firefox still downloads those files. I mean can delete them manually, but it is quite annoying.

Whether the file is opened internally or directly downloaded to the desktop, the file name will be automatically changed to garbled text。This led to me manually correcting the file name to be correct every time I downloaded, and my installation of the "Download File Name Encoding" plugin was also ineffective.

By default ALL BOOKMARKS BACKUP saves on DESKTOP (Windows 11 pro). How can I change where the *.json file is stored (downloaded). I want D:\ZTEMP as the place to save all downloaded files as in settings "Files and Applications" "Downloads" "Save files to" D:\ZTEMP for me. example bookmarks-2026-01-03.json is placed on DESKTOP; I want in D:\ZTEMP. Thank you.

If I check "Always ask you where to save files" to true, the settings is reset to "false" after I restart my browser. Is this a bug? How can I make this setting persistent?

I use Firefox 146.0.1 (64-bit) for Windows 11

Hello! See the screenshot please: so, I downloaded à pay-bill, with Firefox (under ubuntu), in private navigation, and I get the file with a padlock-symbol at the end. What means that? What means that for me (on my computer), what means that for à friend, when I sent him the pdt-file (can he open it?). Nota: I understood that I can choose between "delete downloads when closing the privat window" or not. And I choosed not to delete them (but there appears this padlock-symbol). Thanks for your help! Michael from France