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by riiii 714 days ago
They're also deleting downloaded .pdf whilst in private mode. Yes even when I click save as. It gets downloaded to my downloads folder and then sometimes it's deleted when I close the browser. Sometimes.
5 comments

It's not a bug, it was designed this way: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1790641#c11

That being said, I hate it, it's awful UX. If something is in the "Downloads" folder, it should never be automatically removed, it's not "Temp".

Not to mention that there's absolutely no indication in the UI that your downloads will be deleted. Also, there's no obvious way to make the downloaded file permanent, other than manually copying it outside the "Downloads" folder.

Comment on the bug. Private mode should save to a Downloads/temp folder, and the Download/Save UI should offer an "export/keep" function.
That's actually a comfort to hear.

I use private browsing when doing legal work so an errant Google session doesn't hoover up anything it shouldn't, and I've had so many random documents and briefings just disappear that I'd convinced myself that I was just mistaken about saving them.

Oh, so that's why some files sometimes are auto-forcibly-downloaded into the usually-unused download directory which I had named ~/Downloads/wtf-firefox/ for now-obvious-but-previously-noticable "what the fuck" reasons. Didn't know that it was being emptied behind my back though!
That's really worrying. Can you reproduce it?
Quite a lot of the time yes. But the existing bug tracker issue is full of comments and a disgruntled employee has locked further comments.
about:config and set this to true "browser.download.start_downloads_in_tmp_dir"