Firefox 98 messes with downloading

Tech Talk Internet
1

Firefox 98 is released today (2022 March 8th) and they messed with downloading. It looks to me like this is a potential danger zone for inexperienced users… with the potential to accidentally tell Firefox to always open certain files. (Who actually wants this option that isn’t smart enough to add in a download manager add-in??)

I have my Firefox set to always ask where to save a download, so I am somewhat protected from this automation. I just opened up about:config and then toggled the setting browser.download.alwaysOpenPanel to off so that there is no accidental clicks enabling anything automatically.

The Firefox 98 release notes are here:

And the download specific change notes:

2 Likes
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I had that happen with Chrome and Safari; so I don’t think it’s Firefox issue. I think it’s issue with your ISP and/or something on your computer. In may case it was my bad ISP slowing me down and Windows update running in a VM app.