Prefetching files to a temporary location while the save dialog comes up might look like a good idea, but it causes so many problems that the disadvantages by far outweigh the advantages: - prefetching does not what a user expects: what is expected is that the file will get retrieved to the specified location, and that the progress of the download can be monitored by looking at the growing file, and that the file will not be accessed when the download is canceled. - if the disk space where the temporary file gets stored is too small the download will fail - if the temp directory is not accessible the download will fail - if the file is big, moving it from the temp direcotry to the final location will take a long time - if the disk space of the destination path is too small, the download will fail only after too much has already been downloaded - if mozilla crashes the temporary download file is hidden somewhere in the temp dir under a strange name - if the user downloads a huge file, it is not possible for him to view it while the download is going on to decide whether to continue (e.g. sound or video files) - since one temporary download directory will be used for many users, the space problem gets worse. Also, file permissions might allow other users to get undesired information about downloads.

The issues listed here are already logged under bug 129923, bug 55690, and their (many) dependencies. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 129923 ***

I dont think this is a DUP, since none of these bugs explicitly ask to abandon prefetching, and instead just try to fix *some* of the many issues. However, some of the problems simply *cannot* be fixed without giving up prefetching, and the rest will take forever to fix. So this bug asks to not do prefetching, since it massively breaks things.

johann, please read bug 55690 (whose summary has been changed and is now misleading). "abandoning prefetching" completely is simply not an option; the only reasonable possibility is to prefetch very slowly and into RAM instead of to disk....

Thanks, got misled by the desc. BTW a request to *do* prefetching has been marked "wontfix" in 22796 :)