Exclude Download Folders - Not Recover Them?

[SBIE User]

I love Sandboxie and am trying to persuade my wife to use it with her browser, but she is doesn't like change and this is a hard sell.

Her main concern is that she wants files that are downloaded with a Sandboxed browser from the Internet to a specified folder (say, C:\downloads) to be excluded from sandboxing and go directly to the real folder. I set up that folder for Quick Recovery, but that is not what she wants for reasons I won't go into right now.

I tried adding OpenFilePath=C:\downloads in the config file, refreshed the file, and closed and reopened the browser for the changes to take effect but that did not seem to work. The files were still trapped in the sandbox unless they were transferred using Quick Recovery.

Is it possible to permanently exclude a specified directory from being sandboxed when files are downloaded to it from a browser operating under Sandbox control?

Thanks. I know this is not your problem and essentially weakens the sandbox process, but it would help me a lot in selling my wife on using the program.

SBIE (Happy) User

[SBIE User]

By the way, adding to my request above, I also tried adding this code to the config file:

OpenFilePath=firefox.exe,c:\downloads

Unfortunately, that didn't work for me either when I downloaded a test file with firefox. The file still went into the sandboxed version of the folder rather than being written directly to the real folder.

Hope you can help on this.

SBIE (Happy) User

[tzuk]

Hello Happy, try exploring contents of the sandbox and see if you already have a sandboxed instance of c:\downloads inside your sandbox folders. If you do, delete it. Then try again and see if OpenFilePath now works.

But make sure you don't delete the real c:\downloads.
And make sure you are doing the delete from a regular, non-sandbox folder explorer.

[SBIE User]

tzuk,

Thanks for responding. The folder did not exist in the Sandbox folder, as I use a batch file to securely erase my SBIE folder structure after each session. So I start each session with an empty SBIE folder structure.

I've done some more testing.

My setting in the config file is:
OpenFilePath=c:\downloads

This setting works as intended with Internet Explorer 6 and with Opera 8.54, downloading files directly to the regular c:\downloads folder instead of the sandboxed version of that folder.

Unfortunately, the setting does not work with Firefox 1.5.03 or 1.5.04 on my machine, since the downloads go to the sandboxed c:\downloads folder instead of the real one.

This may be a problem with how Firefox handles downloads generally or it may be a local problem for me based on the extensions I have installed with Firefox. At this point I can't know if it is a general problem or a local, machine-specific problem.

I would appreciate hearing if anyone has been able to get the OpenFilePath setting to work as designed with Firefox 1.5.0.3 or 1.5.04. If so, the problem is with my local Firefox setup and I'll have to start disabling all my extensions to find the culprit. (I have a lot of extensions, so I'm not anxious to do this.)

Any information from any SBIE user on your Firefox experience with this OpenFilePath= setting will be appreciated.

SBIE (Happy) User

[SBIE User]

Following up on my previous note, I decided to uninstall all of my Firefox extensions. I did that and started with a completely clean installation of Firefox 1.5.0.4.

Even without any extensions, the OpenFilePath=c:\downloads does not allow Firefox to download directly to the real folder. Instead, it downloads to the sandboxed version of the folder.

So, my conclusion for now would be that there is something in the Firefox code that prevents this SBIE setting from working as intended. As I said above, the setting works fine with both Internet Explorer 6 and Opera 8.54, so this seems to be a Firefox issue.

Tzuk, I would appreciate it if you would think about what might be causing this problem and whether there is a way to get around it. With the increasing number of Firefox users, this might be an important fix for SBIE.

Thanks for a great product and all the effort you put into continuously improving it.

SBIE (Happy) User

[tzuk]

So, my conclusion for now would be that there is something in the Firefox code that prevents this SBIE setting from working as intended

You're right. Firefox first creates the file in some temporary folder, then moves it to the target download folder.

OpenFilePath configuration was not recognized in the case of moving files, but I fixed this now.

I think I'll probably release a beta version of Sandboxie tomorrow, so you'll get the new functionality then.

[SBIE User]

tzuk,

Thanks for diagnosing this. I'll watch for the new beta.

By the way, is the temp folder that Firefox is using for downloading inside the sandbox?

Thanks again.

SBIE (Happy) User

[tzuk]

You can download it now from the Announcement forum.

[SBIE User]

This is GREAT!!!

The new 2.43 beta is working like a charm. OpenFilePath now works with Firefox.

Many, many thanks.

SBIE (Very Happy) User

[SBIE User]

Oh, one other minor note about the OpenFilePath setting.

I needed to open an entire USB key drive (mounted as z:) for my wife for copying Internet images using Firefox. I discovered that you cannot have a trailing slash with this setting, so the setting has to be
OpenFilePath=firefox.exe,z:
rather than OpenFilePath=firefox.exe,z:\.

This is a minor point, but I thought it might save some folks some time in testing alternatives. Most people would not want to open an entire drive anyway for security reasons, but that's what my wife wanted.

She's a happy camper now that tzuk has enabled the OpenFilePath setting to work with Firefox.

Thanks again.

SBIE (Happy) User