Fixing the missing downloads window in Firefox (Mac)
Posted by shannonclark on August 26, 2008
This evening I encountered an odd problem running firefox on my Mac. I went to Flickr to download a photo of mine to use as a new desktop background. (cc license so you are free to do the same)
But when I went to pop open the downloads window to see the file name to open it, I couldn’t get my downloads window to open. It appeared as a window option on the windows menu, but nothing I did would cause it to actually, in fact, be visible.
So I poked around a bit online and then into the innards of firefox a little bit and I found a very simple, few second solution to this problem.
Search for the following file:
downloads.sqlite
It should be present in your firefox profile directory (if you have multiple users on your computer be sure to delete the one from your current user’s profile).
I chose to delete it, which had the side effect of losing my download history (which I didn’t mind) if you want to preserve that this solution won’t be ideal. To delete I simply moved the file from the folder it was in to the trash.
I then closed Firefox (choosing the “save all tabs first” option). Note this is in the latest stable release version of Firefox for the Mac 3.01 as I write this, the “save all tabs first” option is a new one in the 3.0 release.
On rebooting Firefox I was able to open the downloads window as usual, Firefox rebuilt the downloads.sqlite file without what I can only assume was some form of file corruption.
So that is it, a very simple solution in the category of “get rid of corrupt config files”.
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daftviking said
Thanks so much for posting this – I was having the same problem on my system. I found that if I opened up the downloads.sqlite file in a database tool (in my case, SQLGrinder with a third-party SQLite JDBC driver), that was all it took to fix the “missing download window” problem – didn’t need to trash the file, didn’t lose my download history. Your mileage may vary, of course, but that’s what worked for me.