Firefox: Turning Off the Download Pop-Up

Firefox 97+ has introduced an annoying new “feature”: when you download a file – any file – the download progress meter pops-up when the download completes, whether you want it to or not. Perhaps the pop-up is helpful if you’re downloading a large file over a slow connection… but if you’re downloading a bunch of smaller image files it’s more annoying than helpful.

It’s pretty easy to stop the pop-up window. Note that the following procedure will ONLY disable the pop-up at completion: the other behavior of the download button on the toolbar is not affected:

– In the address bar, type about:config and press ENTER. Accept the warning message (the exact text varies by Firefox version) and click “Continue”.

– Type (or paste) browser.download.alwaysOpenPanel in the search box at the top of the window.

– The value for the entry should be set to TRUE. Double-click the text and it should change to FALSE.

I honestly don’t remember if this requires a restart of Firefox, so you’ll need to figure it out for yourself (I think it doesn’t, but could be wrong). It probably won’t hurt to restart anyway.

One Reply to “Firefox: Turning Off the Download Pop-Up”

  1. You are a danged life saver, that pop up was so frustrating and the only other page I could find mentioning anything like it was from 2011 and the boolean didn’t work.

    For the record, it doesn’t require a restart! I can now save files without an annoying and pointless pop-up. If I want to see the progress of my downloads, I will check them myself -_-

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