“Internet Explorer continues losing its market share. This time it lost more than 1%, from 74.83% to 73.75% (1.08% decrease).” Read more at Internet Explorer Loses.

photo credit: lgkiii

Normally, I don’t have problems with Firefox, my web browser. (Which happens to be much better than Internet Explorer, by the way. Please switch to Firefox.)

So, I was very surprised when I found my Download Statusbar extension wasn’t appearing when I downloaded stuff. Then I tried to save an image to my Desktop, and it just wouldn’t save. I thought I was going crazy.

So I googled my problem, and the first few hits were quite unhelpful. Most were from forums where the person asking the question was treated like an idiot by the resident geeks. Or they suggested drastic actions like deleting your Profile and creating a new one. That means that all your customizations get flushed down the drain, and I have a heavily customized Firefox installation.

Then I struck gold – I wasn’t going crazy. It turns out that just one file needed to be deleted because it had been corrupted.

That file is called downloads.rdf and it is in your Profile folder.

If you have this same problem I had, just close Firefox, find your Profile folder, delete that single file, and when you open Firefox up next, it will create a new, uncorrupted version of that file.

My Download Statusbar is working fine again and saving images works properly. I’m a happy web surfer again.

More info:

Can’t Save images in Firefox « Pascal Grosset

Firefox Profile Location