Stop zip files unarchiving in Firefox

[Bryn]

Ah, but do your Microdrives still work?

I doubt it very much. I have not even tried to power it up this century. The keypad of my Z88 no longer functuons, and neither do the keys on my AgendA.

[MrGongGong]

My ATARI 1040 still works and after going to hear Oktophonie at HCMF the other night i'm tempted to fire it up again

[Dave2002]

I've noticed another possility re hidden files and folders taking up space. I'm currently getting warnings about Dropbox not being able to sync if the spare memory drops too low. Dropbox syncing or not doesn't bother me, but what does concern me is that it might be caching data somewher thus taking up even more space. I only have it on the machine for very occasional use, and because some other people wanted to exchange data using it. It might actually be easiest to delete/uninstall Dropbox from my machine (yet again). Of course it may be that Dropbox is not using very much space at all, but the warning is a slight concern. Other space hogs are browsers which cache a lot of data, and unfortunately email.

Email is a pain. I keep most email and find that useful. Since I use the MBP laptop, there isn't a huge amount of spare space. I'd happily delete some, or indeed most, attachments if I had them backed up elsewhere.

[johnb]

Dave, about your unzipping problem - have you checked in the Firefox Options what the "Applications" are set to do for Zip files (e.g. "Always Ask", "Save File", "Use ****")?

[Dave2002]

Dave, about your unzipping problem - have you checked in the Firefox Options what the "Applications" are set to do for Zip files (e.g. "Always Ask", "Save File", "Use ****")?

I just checked "one more time", and it's set to "Always Ask", but that doesn't stop it unzipping.

I've partially solved the issue which was bugging me, by diverting downloads to an external drive - it works, but still does the unzips on the external drive.. That will work as long as that drive is plugged in, so wouldn't be good for a rock solid permanent solution. Interesting also that the downloads do seem to take significantly longer. The drive is a USB 3 SSD unit I made up. Presumably if downloading direct to the inbuilt semiconductor memory higher transfer rates are possible, which improves the transfer rate on the download link.

In workflow terms this solution is much better as I can leave the download running, and there's plenty of space on the external SSD to allow the unzipping. If I considered overall time, it's possibly slower, as loading direct to my main MBP seems quicker, and usually the transfer from there to the external drive only takes about 20-20 seconds - again via the USB 3 interface. However, it does require quite a bit of manual intervention to copy the files and delete the unwanted ones from the MBP SSD, and for a lot of downloads that is tedious. I could write a script file to automate the manual process, but the current solution seems good enough.

Perhaps using another browser would overcome the automatic unzip issue, or maybe it's a macos feature.

[french frank]

I just checked "one more time", and it's set to "Always Ask", but that doesn't stop it unzipping.[ …] maybe it's a macos feature.

Under Zip archive, there seems to be an option 'Use archive utility (default)'. What's that??? (I have Zip archive set to Always ask). That's for Applications.

Downloads (ie files, not applications) is set to Desktop. When I think about it, I don't often have zipped downloads unless someone emails me a zipped file.