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Creation & Modification Timestamp for downloaded files is NOT preserved

• Edit

Olivier Néumin

20 May, 2016 11:11 AM

Problem:
The creation and modification timestamps of all downloaded files are NOT preserved but set to the current date.

Why this is problem:
Some people download files from servers that keep their names but are changed from time to time (e.g. file archives or log files). If you do not have the original file timestamp, it is impossible to differ the new ones from the old ones.

Possible solution:
All Cocoa programs like Safari do preserve the creation and modification timestamps for downloaded files. Probably it is a very easy task to implement this behaviour in TenFourFox, too, by using the Cocoa API to adjust the timestamps.

1. Support Staff 1 Posted by Cameron Kaiser on 20 May, 2016 04:09 PM

   

   This is actually a very long running complaint against Mozilla, and in general they have been sceptical of the idea. See, among others,

   https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=178506 (note that this was WONTFIXed)
   https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=733954

   There is a very unreliable extension that could enable this functionality, but I am doubtful it works properly with current versions of TenFourFox or Firefox (it didn't work properly even at the time). You make a rational case but fixing the problem requires some moderate amount of low-level plumbing and I am not likely to do this myself.

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2. 2 Posted by kitchen2020 on 24 May, 2016 08:22 AM

   

   Thank you very much for answering!

   I thought it would be a feature much easier to implement as almost every other downloading browser and downloading tool (Safari, Internet Explorer 5.5(!), iCab, curl & wget, Transmit) is preserving the file date.

   • Might be just requesting the file's date from the server and adjusting the final file after downloading with the right date (like the touch command does?)

   • A work-around might be implementing a menu point in the context-menu spawning a curl/wget thread which does the heavy lifting of downloading the file with the right date. (no progress view in the download manager then, I suppose)

   • Modern Cocoa API has the NSURL framework which supplies high-level functions to download/upload files. It is known to preserve the file's date as it is used in the Safari browser. I do not know if it is already available in Mac OS X 10.4/10.5 which you are aiming.

   Greetings.

   20.05.2016, 19:09, "Cameron Kaiser" <[email blocked]>:

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3. Support Staff 3 Posted by Cameron Kaiser on 24 May, 2016 01:56 PM

   

   While the solution might seem simple, the download manager in Firefox/TenFourFox is implemented in JavaScript, not C/C++, which is different from all of the browsers you mentioned. Some plumbing needs to be done at the low end to pass these values along on the channel and the front end needs to handle them. It's not a massive undertaking but it isn't a trivial one. Again, it's not something I'm likely to work on myself.

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