Recently we’ve covered preview of Australis interface for Firefox which is going to be default theme for Firefox, since Mozilla making changes to Firefox interface, these changes includes new UI for their Download Manager which appears in Popup when you download files, this new download manager is panel-based and may land with Firefox 16. Currently you can test this feature in Nightly build of Firefox with a clean profile, but this Downloads panel code present in current Firefox 14 Beta and Firefox 15 Aurora builds but it has been disabled by default, let us see how to enable Downloads Panel in Firefox 14 Beta and we also look at features it going to offer.
Firefox’s Panel Based Download Manager
If you’re not using beta version of Firefox, you can download the same from here which overwrites your current stable version.
Enabling Downloads Panel in Firefox
Visit about:config in Firefox address bar and toggle for the preference value of “browser.download.useToolkitUI” and restart Firefox browser. It’s value has been set true for us we changed its value to False with a double click.
Downloads icon doesn’t appear at the end of navigation bar until you initiate a download or you can drag and drop Downloads icon from Toolbar layout onto the Navigation bar. Once a file download starts it appears in the panel and its progress being shown on navigation bar and you’ll be notified once the download is finished, you can click on finished download to open it from the panel.
This Downloads panel’s notification area only shows downloads of current session, however you can view all downloads in other sessions by clicking on “show all downloads “ in Panel which opens History window.
Note: Panel based Download Manager doesn’t work with custom themes in Firefox beta, that’s why it is recommended for users to test this feature on nightly build with a clean profile.
I’ve been wanting to check this out
why late check now:)