Firefox Community Forum

Yesterday all of my PDF documents were converted or changed to "Firefox HTML Documents". The change was made without my consent or action, after I yesterday used my laptop File dropdown menu to "export" and convert six new Word documents into six PDFs, which were saved on my Toshiba laptop and intended for uploading and filing with a governmental body. My Toshiba laptop runs Windows 10. This error and unauthorized action by Mozilla Firefox affects many dozens of PDF documents that I have created and saved over the last decade and causes me great inconvenience and harm.

How can I restore my PDFs to their correct form and format as PDFs, not "Firefox HTML Documents", which may not be uploadable or usable with court, government or other website portals?

How can I prevent Mozilla Firefox from making this unauthorized error and conversion of PDF document again?

Additional Edit of my question - After reading comments from numerous others that had the same problem of unauthorized change of PDFs to Firefox HTML Documents, I have the following additional question. How can we contact someone at Mozilla to make them stop their destructive highjacking of people's documents? I'm a lawyer, so in my world tampering with someone's document, that is required by law to be submitted as a PDF, can have serious real world consequences. I'm sure this is true of many other people's documents in many other fields and businesses. Who can we contact at Mozilla to insist that Mozilla's tampering with PDFs has to stop immediately? If Mozilla will not stop misappropriating control and tampering with documents, people should be compensated for any harm that Mozilla causes to such a large number of people.

Dear ,

Please help me when my file downloaded it seems extention is added to my file.

Ex: i downloaded a file name questionare.xlsx the output for the file is UTF-8questionare.xlsx

Please give me feedback and resolution for this issue. This just happend in April 17,2025.

Good morning. Please I would like your help regarding the following problem that I have been facing suddenly for a few days. Any file I download via email or anything else has UTF-8 stuck in front of its name. Why is this happening all of a sudden? Thank you in advance..

When accessing Outlook (https://outlook.office.com) using Firefox ESR version 128.9.0 and attempting to download a file attached to an email, the string 'UTF-8' is automatically inserted at the beginning of the file name, which is causing issues. This phenomenon does not occur with other browsers such as Edge or Chrome.

Is there a way to solve this problem?

Hi Guys,

FireFox keeps saving Torrent links to my Downloads folder even though I have set it to just open the links directly with my torrent client. This is super frustrating having to go into my downloads folder on a daily basis just to delete a laundry list of .torrent files. How do I get this crap to PERMANENTLY stop from downloading and just opening directly with my torrent client?

Mozilla (and this feature of Firefox forcibly downloading files to my drives after being specifically marked to be opened DIRECTLY), is just Mozilla and FireFox purposely & forcefully shortening the lifespan of my SSD's. By forcing these link files to be downloaded to my Downloads folder (filling it up with crap) which in turn is forcing me to constantly delete these (link files) is causing unnecessary extra wear on my SSD!! I live in South Africa where an SSD costs the same as 8 MONTHS worth of utilities (electricity and gas). So we tend not to look kindly on unnecessary wear and tear... especially if there is a function to minimize this but it simply doesn't work as it's supposed to.

Please give me a way to completely and permanently STOP FireFox from downloading these magnet links to my SSD or kindly recommend a better/different browser that doesn't do this.... just like the "old FireFox" didn't.

Thank you.

Hi, I'm running into an issue where when I download a CSV-file from a website it's downloading as a pdf when it should be downloading as a csv. If I after the download rename the file back to the csv-extension, I can open it in Excel. Any ideas? I run Linux on my laptop.

After downloading a file which is saved to my Mac Download Folder the file is removed once I close the Firefox Web window. I checked the folder before the window was closed and the file was there. After closing the window the file is no longer in the folder. Also it is not in the trash.

Greetings Team,

I just wanted to highlight a thing constantly bothering me while saving file through the browser.

Whenever I try to save file by default "UTF-8" is adding at the start of the file name I wanted to save.

Kindly look into this.

Regards Sagar Kulapkar

I am trying to download videos from a site that I newly subscribed to. The videos do stream perfectly. The files do not download as video files and will not open at all. When I click on the download link, there is no recognition of a download happening and when I check my files later I have an "internet" file showing with a title but without a video file extension and nothing will open. The file extension is ".html". I am following the step by step instructions from the site involved. Other sites videos are downloading as expected.

Does firefox need to be my default browser? Any suggestions how to remedy this without losing what is working? Are there plug-ins that can address this issue?

Thanks.

I have a few websites where I can download videos to view later. One of them downloads into the designated file but it shows up as an internet file (.html) and will not open or play as a video. What can I do to fix this without messing up the ones that work ?

in the last couple of days every time i download the file it adds the above characters to the name. very annoying - i need then to rename every file. any suggestions?