I have Preferences->Privacy->"Remember download history" unchecked. However, when I opened Bookmarks->"Show All Bookmarks", it included a "Downloads" section with a full history of downloads. Steps to reproduce: 1) From the Firefox menu, open Preferences. 2) Go to the Privacy tab. 3) Uncheck "Remember download history". 4) Download a file, and wait for the download to complete. 5) Optionally, close and reopen the browser, to confirm that doing so does not affect remembering download history. 6) From the Firefox menu, in the Bookmarks submenu, open "Show All Bookmarks". 7) Select the Downloads section on the left. 8) Observe the download in the list, which Firefox should not have remembered.

while that may be confusing, the dialog refers to the Download Manager, while the Downloads section in the Library is actually browsing history (limited to downloads visits, but still visits). This will likely be clarified when moving to the new download manager panel. Adding a dependency on bug 675902 even if it may not be the actual bug that will take this into account.

(In reply to Marco Bonardo [:mak] from comment #1) > This will likely be clarified when moving to the new download manager panel. Yes, we're removing the preference from the user interface in bug 697679. "Download history" in the old sense will never be preserved across sessions.

OK, that makes sense. I guess it doesn't make much sense to save page history but not download history. The current situation definitely seems confusing, but removing the preference (and the download manager) seems like a fine way to fix the problem. Marking this bug as a duplicate of 697679, since fixing that bug will fix this one completely.