Forum Discussion
Provide run / open / save / save as options when downloading files - Discussion
Hello everyone,
Thanks so much for all the feedback provided regarding Open/SaveAs. We are now introducing an option for users using Edge version 87.0.629.0 and above to choose, for each download, whether they want to Open, Save As, Save, or Cancel a download. To enable this option, navigate to edge://settings/downloads and enable, "Ask me what to do with each download." Once you download a file after enabling that setting, you will have the option to Open, Save As, Save, or Cancel it. If you choose to open it directly, it will be downloaded to a temporary folder.
Additionally, we have exposed an option to directly delete downloaded files from your computer, in the browser so that you can easily clean up after downloading your files without leaving the browser.
To learn more about these features, please check out our post.
Personally, I like the banner at the bottom of IE/Classic Edge, but I love some of the other ideas. One thing that would help is always opening a PDF file. Sometimes it opens in another tab, but many times you get the prompt for download. I don't necessarily want the website to determine what happens. I want the PDF to open in a temporary location that will be cleared when I close the browser. If I want or need to save/print the PDF, the viewer buttons are sufficient for that.
For exe or msi files, I would probably want a prompt because 90% of the time I want to run them on the computer I'm using, but 10% of the time I'm downloading them to save for later or run on another computer. Otherwise, the right-click menu could be made better to handle files. If I'm running it, delete the temporary file when the browser is closed.
Office files I would expect to just open in the program. If you close it, Office will prompt to save or close without saving.
Like one person suggested, maybe a setup page to control what happens to the majority of file types. Some people clicking on a picture might just want to view the picture in a modal, close and move on. The modal could have options for save/print, etc. As we see with the suggestions, each person is going to want their own flavor of something.
Maybe a good solution would be make better use of the right-click menu. You could either turn on the IE banner in setting or use right-click with more/better options. I know lots of options takes more coding time, but most people are going to want more options than fewer.
One more thing to think about, when clicking on a html or htm file that someone has in a documents list on their website, the file just needs to open in the browser in another tab. Why would I want to download that? I just want to view it or print it. Example would be that a company sends an email to a customer and places that in the document list for that customer as an html file. I as the agent of the company have access to view what was delivered to the customer. I don't want to save that locally. I just want it to open and view.