The Core Dump

The Core Dump is the personal blog of Nic Lindh, a Swedish-American pixel-pusher living in Phoenix, Arizona.

[By Nic Lindh on Wednesday, 26 September 2007]

Firefox downloading PDFs to Lexmark folder

A solution to a weird Firefox glitch is proffered to the altar of Google.

Posting this so Google can find it and hopefully save somebody else some time.

At the Salt Mines we’ve deployed mobile home folders for our Mac users, and a couple of them have had problems where if you attempt to download a PDF in Firefox, it throws an error message about not being able to save the file into /Library/Printers/Lexmark/whatever.

Other browsers can download PDFs just fine.

Removing every last trace of Firefox and its preferences files and reinstalling will not fix the issue.

Turns out that for some reason Firefox gets its default download folder setting from Safari. (Yes, huh? is exactly what I said.) That default setting is corrupted in Safari, even though Safari can download things just fine.

So the solution is to simply reset Safari’s Download folder to something sane, and everything is hunky-dory.

Now back to your irregularly scheduled programming.

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