Good question. You can restyle many parts of Firefox's UI, but I don't know about the Library dialog. Since that dialog also is used as the Bookmark Organizer, I'm not sure you want to suppress the left column. Figuring out how to fine-tune the tweaking just for downloads could take some time.

As a workaround, if you prefer the old dialog, there apparently is a way to switch back. I haven't tried it myself. Check out this thread: Got new version, want to go back to previous download box, the new one has no history and doesn't show speed of download, how do I go back?

Thank you, you're a lifesaver :D

As an aside I think it would be a good idea if a lot more of these options were accesible through the menues rather than only through about:config

Dialogs certainly are easier than about:config, but it's hard to know where the draw the line -- we already have a lot of sub-tabs and pop-ups in the options. There are a couple of extensions that present many more options in a dialog format, and it would be interesting to see how often people actually use them.

Could you link the extensions you're mentioning?

About the where to draw the line, how about this: Introduce user modes: beginner, normal, expert. Each could focus on different user needs. I know it complicates development, but it would also solve problems.

Found a number of extensions. Search term: config

@ jscher2000 Thanx for that link!! Using Firefox for years and this new download thing is one of the worst things they did to a perfectly fine feature of FF :(