Saving the page or a downloaded file does not work
If I try to save the current page, by selecting Save Page As from the File menu or the right-click pop-up menu, nothing happens. Similarly, in a tab displaying a downloaded PDF, clicking on the folder icon that should save a copy of the file does nothing. No error indication that I can find, but the Save dialogue does not appear. The same operations work as expected in Chrome, so it doesn't appear to be a general problem with my system.
I really don't want to switch to Chrome as my primary browser, but not being able to save PDFs is a show stopper for me.
Chosen solution
I never found an actual solution to this problem; I tried purging and reinstalling the xdg-desktop-portal packages, and that didn't help. However, based on a hint I ran across in my searches, I removed the Ubuntu Firefox snap package and instead installed the deb version, and now Firefox can save files again.
The problem may have been caused by the way I've handled system upgrades over the years. As part of preserving the ability to boot back into the previous OS version, I've kept most of my user data on a separate partition, and a lot of the subdirectories in my home directory are symbolic links to that second partition. That included my preferred Firefox profile, and I suspect the problem originated with limitations on the snap package accessing files on a different partition.
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Additional information: I tried starting Firefox from a terminal window, and when I click on Save Page As I get the following message:
Gtk-WARNING **: 20:52:50.462: Can't open portal file chooser: GDBus.Error:org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.AccessDenied: Portal operation not allowed: Child process exited with code 2
The presence of "file chooser" in this warning is very suggestive, but I have no idea what to do with it.
On Linux this can be an issue with "xdg-desktop-portal" and you may have to install some packages like xdg-desktop-portal and xdg-desktop-portal-gtk. Whether to use gtk portal for the file picker. 0:never 1:always 2:auto (true for flatpak or GTK_USE_PORTAL=1, false otherwise)
- about:config => widget.use-xdg-desktop-portal.file-picker = 0
- https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/search/?product=firefox&w=2&q=%22xdg-desktop-portal%22
Chosen Solution
I never found an actual solution to this problem; I tried purging and reinstalling the xdg-desktop-portal packages, and that didn't help. However, based on a hint I ran across in my searches, I removed the Ubuntu Firefox snap package and instead installed the deb version, and now Firefox can save files again.
The problem may have been caused by the way I've handled system upgrades over the years. As part of preserving the ability to boot back into the previous OS version, I've kept most of my user data on a separate partition, and a lot of the subdirectories in my home directory are symbolic links to that second partition. That included my preferred Firefox profile, and I suspect the problem originated with limitations on the snap package accessing files on a different partition.