I believe the current problem is that Mozilla has removed status bar so there's no way to know if a file is downloading without a separate window being constant

I believe the current problem is that Mozilla has removed status bar so there's no way to know if a file is downloading without a separate window being constantly open. The way to open up download window is not very accessible either, especially on Windows where menu bar is hidden. (OK, you can still access it from the access button on the top left, but still...) I'm not sure how Mozilla will handle the file saving dialog, but with the current UI, there are two window popups in order to download something: the file saving dialog and the download window itself (which user may choose to open or close it, but require to do so every single time he downloads something). That means before they hide the status bar, you have three UI pieces just for managing a download, with two being intrusive. The new approach will reduce that intrusiveness interaction to minimum, will have an indicator on active window as long as something is active in the download list and will put everything in a single place rather than all over the UI.