Fix for Firefox Dumping Files to the Desktop on OS X

I love firefox 3 or, more specifically, I love its add-ons, AdBlock Plus, Sage Too, foxmarks, and a few other. IMO the browser itself isn't as clean as Safari and has a few annoyances. Number one on this list is that it dumps any file opened with a third party application on the desktop. This includes PDFs and anything that is uncompressed or unpackaged, e.g. zip files. Downloads go to wherever they are set in preferences, but transient files end up on the desktop.

For some reason this really bugged me. Yesterday I decided to find a fix for the problem, unfortunately googling anything including firefox, desktop, downloads, file, directory, and desktop finds a bazillion pages that are all fairly useless. After too long I began going through bugs on the mozilla site and came up with bug 312292 with lots of mac people complaining and a few mozilla people pleading with them to use the vote system and posting etiquette guidelines. The the bug has been open for three years, so I can understand why the guidelines may not have been consulted.

Anyway, the easiest way to fix it is, strangely, download camino and set its download directory to the place you want temporary files to end up. This works because firefox and camino use a now-deprecated safari setting as the place to expand temp files, which is dumb. The bug has all the details if you care.