the more I think about it, "always open" sets the PERMANENT function of an application setting.

The sort of thing that should be in Settings.

Oddly enough, it already was. And still is.

It seems perverse to have the option to set the permanent browser behaviour EVERY SINGLE TIME you right click on a downloaded item because you want to, for instance, open the folder instead of the item.

Sticking it right at the very top of the menu so you're likely to select it by accident every time is guaranteed to get people having to Google how to "undo" accidental selections of this option.

Is there now a policy of putting all the settings options at the top of context menus ?

This article summarizes Firefox 98 changes to how file downloads are handled, including the new "Always Open Similar Files" option: How file downloads are handled in Firefox

For more information about this specific change, see the "Adding download actions" section of the Manage file types and download actions in Firefox article.

The people who answer questions here, for the most part, are other users volunteering their time (like me), not Mozilla employees or Firefox developers. If you want to leave feedback for Firefox developers, you can go to the Firefox Help menu and select Submit Feedback... or use this link. Your feedback gets collected by a team of people who read it and gather data about the most common issues. If your feedback is about a defect (bug) in Firefox, you can also file a bug report.

Thanks Alice for your reply. The link to the changes documentation was useful.

I understand that you're serving a volunteer role, not employed by Mozilla and appreciate your time and effort :)

I still take issue with the change in application behaviour. I have already submitted feedback.

It doesn't seem to me that there is an obvious way for Firefox users to vote on approval or disapproval of a change that has already been made to Firefox functionality, let alone a core function.

In the linked documentation I note the following

I want to approve each download before it happens, is there still a way to do this? Firefox no longer shows the dialog because downloads are usually intentional. Having to click a second time for a download to start is usually unnecessary.

I would contend that having the option to permanently change a system setting in a right-click context menu is heading onto shaky ground to start with, but actually putting it right at the top, so users have to be especially careful to avoid accidentally selecting it, otherwise they'll have to dive into settings, try to remember which file type it was, then put the setting back to what it was that they wanted it to be before accidentally permanently changing it, is REALLY asking for users to become frustrated. I would imagine having to correct this problem for specific files types every few days because of accidental selection is going to be far more annoying than confirming downloads with a second click, because you have previously chosen to confirm downloads for this file type. In settings.

If the developers do nothing else in respect of this (imo, unwelcome) application core behavioural change, it would mitigate how annoying it is if they would at least move the option to lower down the right-click menu.

Ideally, bringing back the right-click context menu editor add-on viability, which used to exist, would go a long way to alleviating the frustration caused by changes such as this.