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macos saves opened documents to disk

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  • Last reply by Mark Foley

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I've run into the same problem as this question https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1161286, but the solution is not working. I am running Firefox 65.0 (64bit) on Mac High Sierra 10.13.6. When I open a link which is a document (e.g. .docx) it does ask me what I want to open it with (MS Word), but it saves the file to the downloads folder. I've set the about:config setting browser.helperApps.deleteTempFileOnExit to true (verified, exited restarted Firefox), but all this does is set the file created in downloads to read-only:

-r--------@ 1 mpress 10000 13073 Feb 5 18:22 Notice of termination.docx

It still creates the file.

Is there a way to fix this behavior?

I've run into the same problem as this question https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1161286, but the solution is not working. I am running Firefox 65.0 (64bit) on Mac High Sierra 10.13.6. When I open a link which is a document (e.g. .docx) it does ask me what I want to open it with (MS Word), but it saves the file to the downloads folder. I've set the about:config setting browser.helperApps.deleteTempFileOnExit to true (verified, exited restarted Firefox), but all this does is set the file created in downloads to read-only: -r--------@ 1 mpress 10000 13073 Feb 5 18:22 Notice of termination.docx It still creates the file. Is there a way to fix this behavior?

All Replies (2)

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What version of Office do you have installed? And did you verify it was a Office extension not something name changed to .docx?

Modified by WestEnd

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I am using a very recent installation of Office 365 Personal. I don't think it's an Office thing. The same thing happens with LibreOffice. I'm thinking this is simply a bug. Setting browser.helperApps.deleteTempFileOnExit to 'true' does NOT delete the file on exit. Rather, it creates the file in the designated download folder as read-only, which actually makes the problem a bit worse since it's more of an effort to use or delete the file.

If there is no fix that you (or others) know about, I'll post a bug report.