Google Chrome downloads are invisible to Finder on OS X

For some reason whenever I download a file using Google Chrome on OS X I cannot see the file in the downloads folder. The only thing I've done is changed the default download folder to another location. I have noticed that the file is actually there using the 'ls' in terminal. Also, I can open the file from within Google Chrome.

Very odd, but I've had a look into it and found the hidden chflag which hides files from the finder. It's used so that people don't see and interfere with files they're not ment to.

A quick fix (but which I don't like) is to make all hidden files viewable from Finder. To do this open terminal and type:

defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles TRUE

It's very ugly because all I want to do is see the downloads which are hidden, not every file. They're made invisible for a reason.

Looking more into it, it turns out that files can be flagged up as 'hidden'. This makes them invisible. So to make files hidden or not hidden in terminal you type:

chflags nohidden afilethatishiddenforexample.txt

or to make it hidden again:

chflags nohidden afilethatisnothiddenforexample.txt

Think I'll just have to log out and back in again to fix Google Chrome properly.

Firefox not picking up the wpad auto config file

I've decided to setup firefox on the new Windows image but it turns out it doesn't like the options:

• Use system proxy settings
• this is the one I prefer as I can set it using group policy/workgroup manager
• Auto-detect proxy settings for this network

Whenever either of these are ticked you cannot browse the internet.

Had a quick search and think I've found the problem. The browser looks for the file:

http://wpad/wpad.dat

Now when I typed this in the address bar of; Safari, Internet Explorer and Google Chrome; they all downloaded the wpad.dat file. But Firefox was the odd one out as it just displayed the "Unable to connect" and "Problem loading page" errors.

Did a quick search and found this Knowledge Base Article describing how all other browser now use DHCP to help find this address, but Firefox only uses DNS. Also found it here in a blog and more importantly in Mozillas bug reports here (takes a while to load).

The fix apparently is to put a "DNS record for the WPAD server" (described here under 7.2.2)