Restore firefox saving downloads to /tmp

Question

As the result of upgrading to the 22.04 LTS, the behavior of ff's downloading has changed. I've read a few posts about this, but haven't seen anything relevant to solving my problem. Specifically, I want ff to download all files to /tmp/. In the Settings tab using the Browse method, I select /tmp/, but it the setting then shows /run/user/1000/doc/fa9c1cc2/tmp⁩. If I try using this set up, the downloads fail. If I use ~/Downloads, it works, but that's not what I want.

Can someone tell me how to ff to download files to /tmp/? Below is a screen shot of my about:config settings:

Shumway

Answer 1

My solution was to switch to using a .deb rather than a snap. I did this by creating the file /etc/apt/sources.list.d/mozillateam-ubuntu-ppa-jammy.list with the code deb https://ppa.launchpadcontent.net/mozillateam/ppa/ubuntu/ jammy main and then downloading the priority of snaps over .debs following the instructions here: https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2022/04/how-to-install-firefox-deb-apt-ubuntu-22-04

Shumway

This no longer works! (nor does @dpeng's solution) – Shumway

Answer 2

I successfully achieved this by setting the following property in about:config :

browser.download.start_downloads_in_tmp_dir = true

Zhukov

How did configure the download dir? When I do that and configure browser.download.dir manually (in about:config) to /tmp, the files seem to end up in nirvana: I can find them neither in /tmp nor in my home; I've no idea where they get saved to now. – Rubbery

I didn't. browser.download.dir is default (click trash icon). What I wanted to go to /tmp is the multiple PDF files I read each day, but don't want to keep. Firefox saves them in /tmp and opens them with Okular. For others downloads, I configured Firefox to ask me what to do. It selects the last used directory, then ask me to confirm. – Zhukov

Answer 3

There seems to be no "good" way to do this; this is a moderately fundamental limitation of snaps, and firefox has been repackaged as a snap in Jammy. However, two hack solutions from https://askubuntu.com/questions/1263843/how-to-allow-snap-applications-to-access-tmp-folder are:

1. Bind-mount your tmp folder into your home directory:

mkdir /home/you/.tmp
sudo mount --bind /tmp /home/you/.tmp/

(can be made permanent via fstab)

2. Auto-clear your downloads folder on startup: sudo crontab -e followed by adding @reboot rm -rf /home/you/downloads/* to the crontab.

Both of these solutions entail having an extra directory in your home folder :( It seems this is the design trend being followed by Ubuntu with the move to snaps and Wayland, trying to confine things and bring more security guarantees at the cost of flexibility. Such is life!

Brashy

Thanks for the info. While when I first upgraded I was using a snap for firefox, but I actually removed that and installed via .deb. I will try your bind approach, nonetheless. – Shumway

The firefox deb seems to just be a stub which pulls down the snap :( – Brashy

Thanks for the heads up on that. I've removed the snap again and given it low priority using these OMGU instructions – Shumway

From what I can tell, flatpak Firefox also has this problem, so unfortunately the issue is not restricted to snaps. :-/ – Schroth

Answer 4

For me, the simple way to solve this problem encountered on my new kubuntu 22.04 fresh install (packed with Firefox 110.0) was to enter about:config and change the original setting browser.download.lastDir to /home/x___y___z/Downloads, and then set to "true" the option browser.download.useDownloadDir, as show in the next image: browser-download-setting

Loralyn

i am so sorry to report that the initial solution exposed in my comment is gone. machine reboot, Firefox reload, and again.. and again... same problem: all downloads directly goes to /run/user/1000/doc/.... pfff... and another problem detected: if you try to save the files to another location, and next, try to delete that "image" that appears (decide you or not) inside /run/user/1000/doc/... both files were gone... Amazing! Please remove, not only firefox. Remove ALL SNAP things! debugpoint.com/remove-snap-ubuntu – Loralyn

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Answer 5

In addition to Audrey's answer, I found an acceptable workaround by setting the downloads folder to /var/tmp instead.

Schroth