Just hitting <enter> to save a file stopped working

I'd have imagined these controls would be handled by the system file picker itself — is this specific to Firefox now and you can still trigger the implicit action as before in any of your other apps using this same GTK or XDG portal?

Can you please add more details about your Linux distro, versions, and the source your Firefox comes from (system packager or store, binary distribution or a repository?)

Thanx for your reply! It started after I upgraded my Ubuntu 24.04-4 LTS MATE system (6.8.0-124-generic #124-Ubuntu). I discovered it is not just Firefox but everywhere. So this is not a Firefox issue but Ubuntu that has changed file handling behavior. That happened before... As this is not a Firefox issue I'm afraid I have to complain somewhere else. Like the Ubuntu forum. Or change my OS, to eg. Linux Mint. Its version 22.3 does not have this issue. Sorry about the commotion...

No that's definitely good for awareness in case it was some sort of unexpected interaction — however as in most cases the reason for that is usually the more boring, simplest explanation.

Feel free to select some of the replies above as the solution, it will help to surface that in case more folks search for the same.

I'd generally expect this to be both quite a popular functionality, and rather customizable on the system level per se — so unless it's a bug, it might just need tweaking back a bit — something a forum for your desktop environment might be the most helpful and aware of any changes…

Not a solution per se but at least I know it's not Firefox related but system wide. Linux Mint 22.3 does not exhibit this unwanted behavior so maybe it's time to migrate.

There is notably a report about XDG portals with some packaging and configuration differences, in case that version range would land on the same general area: https://support.mozilla.org/questions/1589917 (non–default setting for packager–specific pref, potentially using a different Gtk stack, the built–in and the env–provided ones differing in two features at that point).

Maybe you'll find some common similarities in the pickers changing behavior.

It looks like this is a Firefox issue after all. On Bugzilla there's a long thread about this exact issue. One contributor reported that this severely upsets people's workflow and I agree. This seems a "feature" that was deployed without proper auditing. I hope this will be reversed. I can now hold off reinstalling my system...

Similarly to the linked threads, the report starts with changing the system portals — so it might yield different results for e.g. flatpak users if they use default vs. custom configuration.

If it's not immediately apparent from the timeline — it was a security patch that was coordinated supposedly across the ecosystem. (I'm not familiar with broader details. The RHEL/Gtk folks on that bug were involved though.)

It's https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2026-12322

So some of the details are not public at this point.

This explains why all four of my browsers are affected (also LibreWolf, Vivaldi and Brave) and the snap version of Firefox (129) isn't. The most frustrating thing of this whole sad story is that this was introduced without any explanation whatsoever. I spent money to attempt to fix this (€200 SSD) which was in vain.

There is another thing that broke with this change: file upload also doesn't work anymore. Instead of hitting <Enter> like I always did (and have to do many times, for example file upload to cloud storage like i(cough)cloud) I now have to use the awkward key combination <Alt>+O.

That is the actual subject of that vulnerability I linked above.

(Discussions ongoing whether to delay the focus before setting default actions etc.; or separate upload vs. download dialog behavior etc. — all mentioned in the timeline of the public bug shared earlier.)

Another update to confirm what I already knew: I downgraded my LibreWolf install to version 151.0.4-1 with dpkg (added --force-downgrade) and now my file save behavior is as expected. I also found that version 6.6.15 of Waterfox behaves like I want it to. So now I have the awkward situation that some browsers refuse to save on [Enter] and others do. All because of an obscure vuln. This takes all the fun out of my computing experience.