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Temporary files in Firefox on OSX

2 Feb 2006

Both Firefox and Thunderbird have an annoying habit on OSX of placing every file you open on your desktop. PDF links, Word files, and email attachments I open all end up on the desktop instead of a temporary location where they belong. If I wanted to save the file to a permenant location, I would have. There appears to be no solution for this other than manually deleting the files off the desktop every so often. I

There’s a fix in the Mozilla trunk that takes care of this, so I hope it will come to Firefox and Thunderbird soon.

Sebti
December 28, 2006 7:40 AM

Hi Zach and others,

Thanks so much for these hints. The proposed solutions (redirection of the temporary files directory) works fine with FireFox, and Thunderbird, but deleting these temp. files works only on FFox. I tried to create a new variable: app.helperApps.deleteTempFileOnExit and set it to true, as suggested by Zach and Phil, but it does not work. May be the name of the variable should be something else.

I appreciate any help. thanks,

Sebti
December 28, 2006 8:03 AM

Finaly, the above hints are also working with thunderbird.

again, thanks so much for these awsome tips. Regards, Sebti

David Goldenberg
January 29, 2007 2:33 PM

Hi, I just stumbled onto this connection between Safari and Thunderbird myself. I would really like to be able to have separate folders for things that I download in Safari versus Thunderbird attachments. Does anyone have any idea how this might be done? Can downloads from Firefox be kept separate from Thunderbird attachments. That might be enough to make me switch to Firefox!

Thanks very much for any suggestions

Eric
February 23, 2007 2:44 PM

Adam, thanks for the post and the ensuing thread. This has been a very annoying bug that I no longer have to worry about.

Hannes Tydén
May 5, 2007 9:09 AM

Many thanks!

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