firefox change download file name Change Default Download Folder [How-To] Firefox is my browser of choice. However, one thing I think they could improve on is their default behavior for file downloads. Unlike IE which prompts you for the location to save downloads, by default Firefox downloads files to the “My DocumentsDownloads” which for some might be just fine however for me, I prefer the prompt. Fortunately configuring Firefox to prompt me where to save files is a very simple process. You can also change the default location if that’s what your after. Here, let me show you how: How to set the Firefox default download folder or Prompt for a custom location. 1. Open Firefox, then Click the Tools menu. Under the Tools menu Click Options. 2. In the Options window, Click the Main tab. Under the Downloads Section choose one of the following options: Always ask me where to save files ( This is what I use ) Save Files to : and Click Browse to select a custom folder ( Some people like downloads to hit their desktop but that’s too messy for me ) When done just Click OK and the settings should take effect right away, no reboot required. Very straight forward. Firefox change download file name. Go to the official Video DownloadHelper page on the Chrome Web Store and click the Add to Chrome button. If you are of an adventurous temper, you may want to use some features before before they are made available for everyone. You can install early releases from the Video DownloadHelper development forum. How to verify Video DownloadHelper is working. Go to this page and start the video. You should see in the Firefox browser toolbar an colored 3-balls icon. The fact the icon is colored indicates there are videos to be downloaded. The number in the small green box shows how many variants of the video are available to choose from. Click on the icon to open the main panel. As everywhere else in Chrome, clicking outside the panel will close it. Click the item in the list. A File Save dialog opens to give you an opportunity to change the name of the file and/or the target folder. Confirm and your file will be soon be on your disk. How to use the companion button. Sorry, there is no companion button on the Chrome version. How to download a video quickly. If you want to skip the file saving dialog and save with the default name to the default directory, click on the 3-dots sign at the right of an item, this opens the list of actions. Check the parameter Use this action as default then click Quick Download . The file will start downloading immediately. Next time you open the VDH panel, simply clicking the item in the list (not the plus sign), it will use the new default action: Quick Download . If you maintain the SHIFT key pressed when clicking on the video entry in the detection list, the Quick Download action will start without closing the panel. This way you can start several downloads quickly as you don't have to reopen the panel for each request. How to read the number next to the VDH icon. This depends on the value for parameter Icon badge in the VDH settings, section Appearance . By default, it is set to Mixed , which means: if there are errors, they appear in red otherwise if there are pinned entries, they appear in black otherwise if there are running tasks, they appear in blue otherwise if there are media detected in the current tab, they appear in green otherwise if there are media detected in other tabs, they appear in orange otherwise no badge displayed. How to prevent some videos from being detected ? Many times, ads videos pollute the Video DownloadHelper hits list. If you want to make sure videos from a particular web site won't be considered by Video DownloadHelper, click on the . sign at the right of the undesired hit, and pick Add to black list . You can choose the domains for which videos served, or appearing in the page content will be ignored. Alternatively, you can also add manually the domains from the settings: More / Black list : Removing domains from the black list can only be done from those settings. How to define the name of the downloaded videos ? Video DownloadHelper includes a feature called Smart Naming . It allows to rename automatically the video file being downloaded from text within the page that contains the video. Smart names are defined on a per-domain basis. By default, when Smart Naming is enabled, the name of the file is taken from the containing page name. To define a video title from a particular site, go to a page containing a video you would like to download and mouse-select a word in the title. Note that it is better to select a word within the title, not at the begining, not at the end. Right-click and select DownloadHelper smart name . If the previewed name is ok to you, confirm. You can remove smart name definitions from the settings, section More / Smart names . From those settings, you can also disable the smart naming feature as a whole. In this case, the file names will be created from the media URL itself. Note that in future add-on version, it will be possible to disable smart naming on a per-domain basis. How to capture media galleries ? Sorry, this feature is not available on the Chrome version. How to use keyboard shortcuts. Sorry, this feature is not available in the Chrome version. How to use pin/auto-pin ? Normally, a detected video remains displayed in VDH while the window that originated this video is still loaded in the browser. When that window closes (you navigated to another page or close the tab), the video appears as "orphan" in VDH and it is removed from the list after 60 seconds (configurable). If you pin that video entry, it does not expire and remain in VDH until you explicitly remove it. If you check Auto-Pin, once a video has been downloaded, it is automatically pinned in VDH. A usage would be that, with Auto-pin set, you navigate the web and whenever you see a video you like, you request the download then continue browsing. After some time, there is in VDH a number of entries, corresponding to downloaded videos, that you just need to click to start playing locally. How to get Video DownloadHelper in a specific language ? If the add-on user interface appears in English and not in your browser's language, this means Video DownloadHelper does not have (yet) this locale. You can contribute by providing your translation using Babelzilla. Firefox change download file name. In this article you will find and introduction to browser’s profiles/preferences and quick solution for managing downloading files from script level. Paweł Motyka | 22 Jun 2017. Introduction. Some time ago I developed Selenium tests for feature, where one of the important parts was exporting reports to file from , then comparing theirs content with reference files. There were a lot of export files (about 300), grouped in some categories, and some files from different categories had the same default names. It was necessary to export files to different folders during executing automation tests, because exported files couldn’t be overwritten. The major problems were: how to change browser download path from the script? how to disable download pop-up dialog during saving file? and how to do that for different web browsers? What to do for example with OS-level dialog in Selenium? First way is to fix the result and – by the way –making your code and tests more complex. Second method is to find the reason and create a workaround. I prefer second way, hope you too, so let’s proceed with the instruction. In this article I’m going to introduce you in browser’s profiles/preferences and show quick solution for managing downloading files from script level. If you are reading this article, I bet that you know well what Selenium is, so we can go directly to the essence of problem. Mozilla Firefox. Whenever you tried to download file via Firefox, for sure you have seen this popup dialog: As long as that’s not big deal for “real” user, it might be a problem for automation tests in Selenium. Maybe you know that even Firebug doesn’t work against window since it’s not HTML or JavaScript based. Selenium works similar – only for browser automation . So anywhere non- browser window will be displayed – like above OS-level download dialog – Selenium is not able to “see” that, therefore we cannot do anything with this window from Selenium level. Now you could think: we can select Save File radio button, click checkbox Do this automatically for files like this from now on , and voilà, problem solved. That would be enough for regular using if you don’t want to see this window for this kind of files. But this is not good enough for automation in Selenium: this is another configuration issue, so every time we will try to run a test on another device we need to remember about that, however we like convention over configuration , don’t we? most important thing: actually that workaround is not working with Selenium. Why? Maybe you observed that Selenium always run “pure” instance of browsers, without any add-ons or user settings. You don’t see your bookmarks, favorites or installed plugins. This is the moment when I should say something about Firefox Profile . What is that? This is a place where Firefox saves personal information such as: bookmarks, settings etc. I’ll show you short Python script which create and configure profile with disabled download pop-up dialog box and set download path as we want to: In the first line of this method object of FirefoxProfile is created. Then you can see using set_preference method for following entries: (" browser.download.manager.showWhenStarting ", False ) – disabling window when a download begins (" browser.download.manager.showAlertOnComplete ", False ) – popup window at bottom right corner of the screen will not appear once all downloads are finished (" browser.helperApps.neverAsk.saveToDisk ", " text/csv ") – list of MIME types to save to disk without asking what to use to open the file – in this case .csv files. This setting is actually disabling download dialog box (" browser.download.dir ", download_dir ) – determines the directory to download, where download_dir is a path. The last line is creating webdriver object with the profile created before. Note : A profile has to be created before webdriver object. There is no possibility to change profile parameters when webdriver object already exists. Link to all Firefox config entries: link. . Downloading files from Selenium point of view is simpler in Google Chrome than in Mozilla Firefox. The main reason is fact that the download dialog box is disabled by default in Chrome, so we don’t have to write any extra code to avoid this window. But what about download path issue? Can we manipulate it from script? Of course we can. Implementing simple code uses ChromeOptions class to managing options specific to Chrome driver. After creating ChromeOptions object, download path is set in JSON-style parameter. And this one is enough for the issue described in this article. Same as in Firefox case, Chrome Options object has to be created before webdriver. More info about Chrome Options: link. IE and other browsers. Unfortunately, since in IE 8 there is no option to disable download dialog. For this reason and the fact that IE webdriver doesn’t support manipulation browser preferences, there is no simple way to manage downloading files in Selenium. I don’t have any experience with automation other browsers like Edge or Safari, as far as I am concerned, for those browser’s options or profiles are still unavailable. Summary. Browser’s options and profiles give us a great tool to control browser appearance and behavior. Small part of this of this functionality has been shown in this article, but it has much more capabilities than just downloading files. Firefox change download file name. When using Google, if I download two files named "unknown" it will save the second as unknown (1) and so on and so forth however when I use FireFix and I attempt to download two files with the same name I will have to type a new file name out and its quit annoying. Is FireFox just lame like this or is there a work around / fix? Chosen solution. Hi Socks, how Firefox handles downloads varies based on your settings. Firefox will add (number) to the file name when the file is automatically saved to a specific folder every time. On the Options page: If Firefox is set to ask you to choose a folder, or if you use a "Save [something] As. " command to call up the file browsing dialog, then Windows blocks you from using a duplicate file name in the selected folder. Does that match how yours works? All Replies (5) Top 10 Contributor. Separate Security Issue: Update your Flash Player or remove it using these links; Uninstall Flash Player | Windows Uninstall Flash Player | Mac. Note: Windows users should download the ActiveX for Internet Explorer. and the plugin for Plugin-based browsers (like Firefox). Note: Windows 8 and Windows 10 have built-in flash players and Adobe will cause a conflict. Install the plugin only. Not the ActiveX. How to Change the Firefox Download Folder Location. Walter Glenn is a former Editorial Director for How-To Geek and its sister sites. He has more than 30 years of experience in the computer industry and over 20 years as a technical writer and editor. He's written hundreds of articles for How-To Geek and edited thousands. He's authored or co-authored over 30 computer-related books in more than a dozen languages for publishers like Microsoft Press, O'Reilly, and Osborne/McGraw-Hill. He's also written hundreds of white papers, articles, user manuals, and courseware over the years. Read more. By default, when you download something using Firefox, that download gets saved to the main Downloads folder for your user account (just like Chrome and Internet Explorer). If you’d rather Firefox save your download files somewhere else, it’s really easy to change the default save folder location. Here’s how to do it. In Firefox, click the “Open menu” button on the right side of the toolbar and then click “Options” on the drop-down menu. On the “General” page, look for the settings in the “Downloads” section. Type your desired download path into the “Save files to” box or click “Browse” and locate (or create) your new download folder that way. If you prefer, you can select “Always ask me where to save files” to have Firefox prompt you with a dialog on every download that lets you specify your download location. When you’re done, you can close the tab. Like we said, changing the Firefox download folder location is a super simple change to make, assuming you know you can do it and where to look. And if, like most geeks, you already knew this, then at least you have something quick to share with people who ask you about it.