Tag Archives: firefox 20

Force Firefox 20 to use the old download manager

Mozilla released Firefox 20 a few days ago that came with various new features such as:

  • a new per-window Private Browsing feature
  • a new download manager
  • the ability to close unresponsive plugins without the need to restart the browser

Sadly my personal opinion about the new download manager feature isn’t very good. The new manager seems to be very user unfriendly and from what I can see there isn’t an option in the settings to clear a download file from the history automatically after the file has been downloaded. Luckily there is an easy solution for this for those that would like to revered back to the old download manager design.

  1. Type about:config in your address bar
  2. Search for browser.download.useToolkitUI
  3. Set its value to true

Now everytime you download something the old version of the download manager will start instead of the new one.

browser.download.useToolkitUI

If you also want to remove the new download button that was added in this new version simply right click on the bar, click Customize… and drag and drop the button you don’t want into the customize toolbar list that will appear.