I love Firefox 4, but one thing I don’t like about it is having the download manager as a separate window. I can’t stand Google Chrome; believe it or not, IE 9 has replaced Chrome as my “second choice browser”. But one thing I do like about Chrome is the way the download manager appears as just another tab.
You don’t need an extension to replicate Chrome’s behavior in Firefox. In fact, setting Firefox up to do this is pretty easy:
1) Click on the Firefox button in the upper left corner of the browser window and select Options > Options. On the “General” tab, uncheck the box next to “Show the Downloads window when downloading a file”. Click “OK” to exit the Options screen.
2) Cut and paste the following address into the address bar:
chrome://mozapps/content/downloads/downloads.xul
This will open the download manager in a tab.
3) Right-click the downloads tab and select “Pin as App Tab”.
The download tab will then appear to the left of your active tabs:
