I am on F43 on a workstation with an older AMD processor using the built-in graphics (ie no graphics card).
Following the automatic update earlier this week (30 march?) Firefox has gone to full screen except for the Fedora info line at the very top, and I can’t get it to go back into a resizable window. Requesting full screen does cover the info line and uncover it but that’s as far as I can get, no place to grab and resize. The bookmarks toolbar is now a section of the bookmarks menu and it won’t move to the top of the screen. Any attempt to download a file REQUIRES that it be stored in a sub-directory of my /home/ which creates a lot of odd problems. I’ve tried everything relevant in the settings without success on either problem.
I suspect I have a configuration error somewhere or there is a setting in the O/S that I need to update but I have no further ideas. Can anyone help?
Hitting F11 bounces back and forth between having the Fedora info line and not having it but still no place to grab the window for a resize. Looks like the window has sized to bigger than the physical terminal size.
Your user cannot download files into any area other than your home directory tree (unless you have ownership & write permissions somewhere else, which is not standard). This is by design of the system.
@Jeff V: I have permisions on where I want to store downloads because I have to pull info for seveal different (unrelated) processes and I just normally store the download info in the proper context. EDIT: More info: can’t even save in /tmp ; What seems to be missing is the “on this computer” location that used to be in the dropdown download menu
Try creating a test user login to see if the issues are some user configuration. For saving files outside your home directory, you could try creating symbolic links under your $HOME directory. There may be selinux changes affecting downloaded content.
Then it seems to come down to how the download is performed.
browser? Most browsers allow a setting for downloads and either use a fixed location or ask the user each time.
Rsync? wget? curl? each has their own quirks
Some other software? It depends on the software how downloads are managed.
You mention a dropdown download menu. Without context, and knowing the details of the software used (version, rpm or flatpak, etc.) answers cannot be targeted for you.
@Jeff V: I’m using Firefox to do the downloads. I probably could use the other download facilities somehow but there are path changes that I have to make on the source sites to get the right data and it is convenient to use Firefox to do them. The “ask each time” is set in Firefox it just no longer has anything that isn’t in my /home/ as a choice (like “on this computer”, or even /tmp/)
@P G: automatic update to the version that I got years ago from the “DNF install” function. I had already done a minimal install and I needed Firefox. I have been updating this Firefox since about F15 or so.
@gnwiii Selinux operates in permissive mode on this workstation; I can try another user but for that I need to do some research but it might be likely as I generally take all the defaults unless I need something specific. Note in reply to Jeff V that I do have permissions where I want to store the data, it’s simply a problem of keeping discrete unrelated functions separate. Symlinks might work but could be quite awkward so I’ll try them last.
@hamrheadcorvette : Sorry, took quite a while to actually get a screenshot. It is in the “not full screen” state - note the black status bar at the top. I can’t get a screenshot of the entire “full screen” state since the icon to get the snapshot is lost under the Firefox screen (status bar hidden). I used to be able to use the “screenshot” icon but this now fails and reports “Unable to capture a Screenshot/all possible methods failed”. No idea why. So this is the best I can do. This is the smallest that Firefox will go that I can find, which is the problem.
Looking at that screenshot it would appear you may have not installed gnome-tweaks. That app allows the user to turn on the 2 additional buttons in the window title bar that used to be there by default (minimize and maximize) adjacent to the x used to close the window.
Try installing that app then set the controls like this and see if it allows you to do anything different.
@computersavvy : YES! that worked. An extra button appeared between the two in your example “restore down” and clicking that put the whole window on the screen so the frames showed and I can now grab them as usual and resize the window. Thank you! Now to find out how to decide myself where to store downloads!
I may be wrong, but If I am understanding this thread correctly, wanting to resize the browser to snap left or right for example, is simply done by double clicking or click+dragging within this highlighted rectangle. Also, @computersavvy ‘s solution may be correct here too.
@hamrheadcorvette : Yes, although I didn’t know about the double click resize until I saw it in this post. I have never used it. What had happened was that Firefox had been resized as soon as the first cursor move over the screen (just moving the cursor, not actually clicking anything) and overfilled the entire physical window. The frame was off-screen on all sides so I couldn’t resize by dragging although F11 would cover or uncover the system info bar as expected. When I installed gnome-tweaks the window resized just a bit smaller so the edges of the frame were available to grab and resize as desired. I’m not sure why Fedora would change something as essential as this and not tell anyone if they were planning to do an automatic push. In my case it made the entire workstation sort of useless because I couldn’t compare an image on the computer with one on the Inet side by side.
I still have the problem with trying to pull files using Firefox to where I want them to go: directories where I have permission but not in my /home/ path. There seem to be a lot of changes on this update that just make the workstation harder to use efficiently but I guess I’ll get used to them. As I used to tell the programmers when I managed the support team in a past life a long time ago: “just because you can do it doesn’t mean you should!”.
@cbravo: Didn’t know that either, I normally just grab the upper frame bar and click and drag. So I guess I learned a lot unrelated to this problem.
Thanks guys!
Fedora did not change it. The overall effect of various software package updates has done that and fedora simply packages the changes.
As far as the gnome-tweaks package, that has been available ever since gnome switched from gnome 3.8 to gnome 40, so for 5 years now. That change in gnome versions (March 2021) was when the change from the default 3 buttons on the title bar became one close button on the title bar.
Ok, I was not following this portion of your thread, but maybe I can post some screenshots of what could/can be done?
@johniliffe So what I have here is a screenshot of My Current Firefox session. This is the file chooser which Firefox calls when you want to download a file from the web.
Below that, is a list of Standard Directories in PATH my /home/User/
The Top Bar is the literal Path. You can simply enter the path of a directory you want to save files in if you have permission to do so. This also includes files that are hidden and you can reveal those by typing Ctrl + h
So I guess I would need to know where you are trying to save files which you might not have access to? For example /root or /home (this is not the same as /home/USER/ )
