How to Hide the Firefox Downloads Status Window
April 7, 2008 – 8:52 am by gabeI don’t know about you, but when I download something, I just want to click a link, have the file or application download, then get to it when I’m ready to open the file or launch the application. If I’m downloading a large file, especially, I don’t need to watch the status. I’d rather get back to work on other stuff and I certainly don’t need to see this window:

Hiding this status window is as easy as 1, 2, 3 (4, 5):
- Open up a new tab in Firefox (control-T, as you might recall from my earlier post on Firefox shortcuts).
- Type about:config into the address bar and hit Enter.
- In the Filter field at the top, type download:

- Look for the option called browser.download.manager.showWhenStarting (you can also filter for exactly that phrase).
- Double-click that option and the value will change to false:

That’s it! Next time you download a file, you don’t have to worry about the annoying status box, but you can check on it at any time by pressing control-J to open the window.
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Hi, I'm Gabe Anderson. I've published more than 2,000 personal and professional blog entries on my other blogs since 2000.
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