Windows in-app browser: agent-triggered PDF download still opens Save dialog with prompting disabled

What version of the Codex App are you using (From “About Codex” dialog)?

26.901.6511.0, verified from the running Windows app package rather than the About dialog.
Bundled runtime: codex-cli 0.153.4.

What subscription do you have?

Not collected for this report.

What platform is your computer?

Windows 10 Pro 22H2, build 19045.7663, x64.

What issue are you seeing?

When Codex clicks Download in the in-app browser's PDF viewer for a website-generated PDF, a Save dialog requires the user to click Save. The user reports this behavior on multiple websites; the bounded tests below repeated one affected PDF flow. This prevents the authorized download from completing unattended to the preselected folder.

The download directory is already configured and writable. The active desktop configuration was also explicitly set to:

[desktop]
browser-download-prompt-enabled = false

The existing browser-download-directory setting was preserved. The resulting configuration parsed successfully. Repeating the same download still required a Save click.

What steps can reproduce the bug?

Observed on September 8, 2026:

1. In Codex Desktop on Windows, select a download folder and disable asking where to save.
2. Open an existing website-generated PDF in the in-app browser. The affected document was already open; no new report generation was needed for the tests.
3. Ask Codex to click the PDF viewer's visible Download button through Browser computer use.
4. Observe that a Save dialog appears and the user must click Save.
5. Explicitly save browser-download-prompt-enabled = false in the active desktop configuration and repeat the same visible Download action. The dialog still appears.

Both affected-flow tests used one visible Download click each. The browser action returned without a tool error. The user confirmed that a Save click was required in each test. A PDF that arrived after that manual click was not counted as an automatic-download success.

A full app restart after the explicit configuration edit was not tested, so whether restart changes this result remains unknown.

What is the expected behavior?

When a folder is selected and asking where to save is off, an authorized Codex-triggered download should save directly there using the supplied filename, handling duplicate names automatically without a Save dialog.

Additional information

• Control test: Codex clicked Download in the viewer for a public sample PDF. It saved automatically to the same destination without a dialog. File arrival and a valid PDF header were verified.
• The control and affected-flow tests ran in separate Codex tasks, so this does not isolate the cause to the website alone.
• The affected site's origin was on the browser's download allowlist.
• The user reports downloads showing Stopped both when Codex initiates them and intermittently when the user clicks Download directly. This is therefore not limited to agent-triggered clicks. The manual-click failure is not reliably reproducible. The Stopped symptom was not reproduced in the bounded dialog tests, and a shared cause with the Save-dialog behavior has not been established.
• Possible trigger to investigate: repeated downloads of the same file. This is a user hypothesis, not a confirmed cause. Some repeated downloads did complete with automatically numbered filenames, so the observations do not establish a blanket restriction on duplicate downloads. Comparing an initial download with repeated attempts may help isolate the intermittent failure.
• Website names and URLs are omitted. No personal names, local folder paths, account identifiers, private document contents, or raw logs are included.

Please investigate whether PDF-viewer downloads consistently honor the saved destination and prompt preference when initiated by the agent.

Start by reproducing the PDF download in the Windows in-app browser with browser-download-directory configured and browser-download-prompt-enabled set to false. Compare agent-triggered and manual PDF-viewer downloads, including a full app restart after the configuration change. Done means authorized downloads consistently reach the selected folder without a Save dialog, while duplicate-name handling remains automatic.