Is there way to disable “Download” bar blinking in Firefox?

Question

I like to use Windows so that task bar is hidden. When I'm downloading something with Firefox, taskbar pops up and starts to blink Firefox's "Downloads" bar and it goes away only if you click it. Is there way so this wouldn't happen? Or so that if "Downloads" window already is there it wouldn't blink it.

Answer 1

Here's how to stop the blinking of the download window:

1. Type about:config into your browser's address bar
2. If you get the "You could void your waranty" warning, uncheck the option to be warned again and tell Firefox you want to continue
3. Copy & paste this into the Filter bar: browser.download.manager.flashCount
4. Double-click the item and set it to 0

You'll need to restart Firefox to let the settings go into effect.

Some other relevant changes you might wish to make:

• Set browser.download.manager.showWhenStarting to false to prevent the download manager from showing when you start a download.
• Set browser.download.manager.showAlertOnComplete to false (just double-click the entry once you've found it). This will prevent that little alert at the bottom of your screen when all downloads complete.
• Make sure that browser.download.manager.focusWhenStarting is set to the default of false to keep the download manager from stealing focus when a download starts.

Hopefully that should help. If not, you can check out some of the details for other download manager settings (and, well, most of the about:config entries) on the MozillaZine wiki pages:

• about:config Entries
• Category: Preferences page 1

(For some reason that I can't quite grok the details on the about:config settings are split up).

Answer 2

I'd personally recommend getting rid of the Dowloads window altogether and installing the Download Statusbar extension. It puts all of your downloads just above the Firefox statusbar, instead of having them in a seperate window.