User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0; Q312461) Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041107 Firefox/1.0 At profile creation time then browser.download.defaultFolder is set to a specific value (C:\\DOCUMENTS AND SETTINGS\\<user>\\DESKTOP) and this value is written to the prefs file. The problem is that the location of the desktop folder can change between logins, in particular in corporate environments where user have a server-side roaming profile and where the location of the desktop folder is different on different computers and/or changes between logins. Also this prevents sysadmins from creating user templates with preconfigured Firefox settings, since the Firefox settings contain a value specific to the user template that can not be automatically changed when a new user is created based on the template. This value should not be written to the prefs file when the profile is created, instead the browser should resolve at runtime the location CSIDL_DESKTOPDIRECTORY (unless the user later on specifies manually a different location, then that should be written to the prefs file and used instead). See bug 74085 for a similar problem, in particular comment #84 and comment #86 (the same logic applies to both the default cache location and default download location if the user does not manually specify different values; it should the computed at runtime). Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Create a new user. 2. Log in as that user and run Firefox. 3. Open the prefs file and look for browser.download.defaultFolder Actual Results: browser.download.defaultFolder was set to a specific value. Expected Results: browser.download.defaultFolder should not be included in a new prefs file, instead the browser should determine the default location at runtime, until the user manually specifies a different location. See bug 74085 for a similar problem, in particular comment #84 and comment #86. The discussion there applies to some extent to this bug.

using pref locking, admins can easily force this pref to whatever they want it to be, even after the fact, as they can with any pref.

But with preference locking the users can't change the value. And the behaviour is wrong; there is no need to write a value to the prefs file that can be determined at runtime, in particular when the value can change. The discussion in bug 74085 elaborates on this issue.

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This is still a problem in the latest stable version and is still a problem in a corporate environment.

This is something we ought to fix for 2.0

browser.download.defaultFolder is now obsolete. browser.download.dir is used throughout.

You didn't fix the bug. You just changed the name of the attribute. The bug still applies to the new attribute.

browser.download.dir is set in the case where your running on Vista for the first time, but I don't believe it's set by default in any other case. Are you seeing something different?