OK, if the 'Launching applications and unsafe files' setting in Internet Explorer settings is set to Disable, Firefox similarly blocks downloads with an entry in the downloads manager such as this: http://kb.mozillazine.org/images/Fx3exeBlocked.png Firefox 2 did not do this. It didn't give a damn about Windows' security settings, and I frequently used it to bypass them. I'm more than happy with that. If a sysadmin really wants to enforce those security settings, they should stop someone installing FF on the system. The absurdity of FF's honouring these settings is emphasized by the fact that other programs, such as Cygwin's wget, will happily download the same file. If a Firefox user wants to download that file, they should be allowed to if Firefox has the permission to do it and Firefox should not put up an arbitrary wall to stop them, IMHO. Now, fine, obey these security settings by default. But please provide a pref to go back to the default FF2 behaviour and let me download .exe's, etc. I am competent. Otherwise I'll have to use wget, which is a slight annoyance. It seems absurd that there is no way to get around this than to change windows policy settings when, and I can't emphasize this enough people, *if they let you install FF, you can install other programs that WILL download the .exe for you and save it*!

Dave, this is not a dupe of that bug. That bug wants a pref which will actually change a Windows security setting, which is a worse solution (and the same has been said on that bug's discussion). Here, I'm simply saying to give the option of ignoring it like FF2 did.

No, that bug just has an unclear summary.

Verified Dupe