Solved: Firefox Downloads Window Empty

Finally found a fix for a problem that’s been bugging me for a while. Some time ago my Downloads window stopped showing anything.

Searching around, I came across a widely acclaimed solution, which was to delete the xml file which stores the information I was supposed to be seeing; supposing it was corrupted. Well, I did that, and there was no effect. I started monitoring that file and noticed it was being updated sanely, so I kind of gave up on that solution.

There is a preference setting choosing whether to always save to one folder, or to ask me each time.

When you have it set to always save to the same place, there’s a button at the bottom of the Downloads window that will take you to that place. I had it set the other way, and I noticed that there was still a button, but it was blank. This is a benign side-symptom of my problem.

My solution was to change the preference so that I always save to the same place. The Downloads window was fixed! Then I changed the preference back again, to what you see above, and the window was still fixed, and now there was no blank location button.

This also fixed another problem I was having, where “right-click and Save As…” was not working, and I could only download things that were accessed through a link. Of course, if I’d been looking for the solution to that problem, I would have found the solution much sooner: Unable to save or download files — Reset download folder.

In most software programs there are parts of the program that manage the data, and parts of the program that allow us to interact with the data. In my case, the interaction/display of the files downloaded was probably short-circuited because it was having trouble displaying the corrupted download location preference.

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US; rv:1.8.1.14) Gecko/20080418 Ubuntu/7.10 (gutsy) Firefox/2.0.0.14