Tadeusz Pietraszek

© 2004-2007 Tadeusz Pietraszek

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Avoiding temporary files on desktop on OS X

While working with OS X I found it immensly annoying that Firefox saves every single PDF/PPT/DOC file I ever looked at on my desktop. I am a messy person to begin with (and so is me desktop), so I don’t want any application to place random files there on top of that ;-)

What I did first was to change Preferences>Main>Save Downloaded files To and it did change the location of downloaded files, but, surprise, surprise, not the automatically downloaded ones. Having looked for help on the web I found the solution:

  1. Change the actual location of the temporary files in Safari, which in turn changes where Firefox stores its temporary files! Surprisingly the option in Safari called “Save downloaded files to” affects both the downloads and the temporary files, and the one in Firefox, called “Save files to”, affects only the files explicitly downloaded.
  2. Make Firefox delete downloaded files on exit. To do this you need to go to about:config and create a new variable called app.helperApps.deleteTempFileOnExit and set it to true. I think it only works in FF2.0

I used both solutions: (1) (don’t want to have temp files on my desktop in any case) and (2) (if I want to keep a PDF I probably save it somewhere else). It works great now!

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 4th, 2007 at 8:12 pm and is filed under Tips&Tricks. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

6 Responses to “Avoiding temporary files on desktop on OS X”

  1. Axel Says:
    March 8th, 2007 at 12:47 am

    Thanks for the tip! I always found that very messy too but did not go out to find the solution!
    It works like a charm now! - Axel

  2. Graham Says:
    October 26th, 2007 at 1:15 pm

    Unfortunately this isn’t working on Leopard with Safari 3.

  3. Daedius Says:
    November 8th, 2007 at 4:45 pm

    “Unfortunately this isn’t working on Leopard with Safari 3.”
    I experienced the same thing. Most disappointing.

  4. Sapius Says:
    December 12th, 2007 at 2:22 am

    Very true- this worked perfectly for me before upgrading to Leopard- now the crap is starting to pile up again! We need a new fix.

  5. livy Says:
    January 29th, 2008 at 10:56 pm

    Yes, this does not work. A terrible disappointment. One of the most irritating features of firefox.

  6. luckylou Says:
    February 29th, 2008 at 11:33 pm

    Quit Safari and Firefox first. Then try killing the com.apple.internetconfig.plist file (there may be another one, too, called something close, like com.apple.internetconfigpriv.plist - may as well kill that, too). Re-specify download location in Safari, then open Firefox and give it a go. Worked for me, and I am using Safari 3.

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