Unfortunately, this is not a native feature in Firefox. However, after looking online, it seems that maybe the Download Cleaner Lite extension for Firefox may be what you are looking for.

It works on a timer rather than constantly monitoring to see if a download is completed, but it's likely the closest to what you are looking for.

Hello Wesley,

Thank you so much for the quick answer. I have looked at that extension but I was looking for a straightforward tweak to get it done.

I'll give that extension a try and if I do come up with something I'll let you know.

I believe Firefox in the past use to do this automatically - so a question for the developers is - what changed?

Regards, techspecX

Hi techspecX, do you just want to hide downloads from the arrow drop-down -- they would still be visible if you "Show All Downloads" (Ctrl+j) -- or do you also want to remove them from there as well?

You may be able to hide downloads from the drop-down using a custom style rule in a userChrome.css file. Presumably you would want that only for completed downloads and not downloads in progress. Someone would need to work out the details.

** EDIT **

The following style rule will hide downloads that have certain statuses. Completed, of course, but also canceled and blocked. I don't know what all the blocked statuses mean, I just got the numbers and included all three.

/* Hide downloads that are not in progress 
   from the toolbar button drop-down */
#downloadsPanel .download-state[state="1"], /* Finished           */
#downloadsPanel .download-state[state="3"], /* Canceled           */
#downloadsPanel .download-state[state="6"], /* Blocked (parental) */
#downloadsPanel .download-state[state="8"], /* Blocked (dirty)    */
#downloadsPanel .download-state[state="9"]  /* Blocked (policy)   */ {
  display:none !important;
}

If you want to try it out on yours, we could give the steps to set up a userChrome.css file. If you already have one, you can add the above rule to the end of it.

Another workaround is to download the file in the New Private Window. In that case the downloads are managed via the about:downloads page and cleared automatically when you close all PB mode windows.

Hello All,

Thanks for these great tips. I am sure that I could utilize that someday. For right now I just wanted the downloads to disappear once they were downloaded so as not to clog my download list.

The extension that Wesley recommended seems to be doing the job right.

Thanks again to all.

Regards, techspecX