Friday, January 30, 2009

Calling All Firefox Geeks!

So something has changed within Firefox for me recently, and I have no idea why (although if I had to guess I'd say I must have accidentally changed a setting without knowing it).

The scenario is this: I right click on an image, select "Save Image As..." and press Enter. What used to happen was that I'd get a pop-up window that showed my "Pictures" folder along with 2 input fields, one for the file name and another for the file extension to use. Now, however, both input fields are gone, leaving only "Save" and "Cancel" buttons on the lower part of the window. Thus, there's no way for me to specify the file name to use. Instead, I have to blindly "Save" and then go find whatever default file name was used and rename it to what I want it to be. This only started a few days ago, but I really have no clue how to get it back to the much friendlier way in which it used to work.

Anyone know how to fix this? An all-impotent Blog Point to the first person who can solve this for me.

3 comments:

cjguerra said...

I had a look and there are two areas to check. Under the Tools->Options menu, there is a multi-tabbed dialog box. If you select "Main" from there, it asks what to do with downloaded files. I have it set to "Always ask me where to save files."

Another possibility is in the same dialog, select the "Applications" menu. This shows what to do with each file type. It may be that the files you are trying to save are being 'managed' by some other application - something is getting in the way there. Look for the file extensions and play with the options there.

If you haven't already done it, get the "NoScript" plugin - it really helps control malicious sites by preventing embedded objects and Javascript from executing with out permission. I have mine set to accept anything from the domain, but the default is more restrictive. It could be some script altered something without you realizing. That's kinda thin, but the plugin is still good.

Kimota94 aka Matt aka AgileMan said...

Good suggestions, Chris. I'd actually already tried your first two suggestions, but hadn't considered the third.

Rather than trying that, though, I opted for a more basic approach: I shut Firefox down and then restarted it, and Voila! It's now back to normal.

For at least trying to help me out, I award cjg a good-for-nothing Blog Point.

cjguerra said...

Woo hoo! Simple persistence can have it's own non-reward!