SEB gets blocked (force machine restart required) after an attempt to download file on some machines due to inconsistent folder access settings requested by SEB

[Lightras]

When user tries to download a file in the exam, while in SEB on MacOS, nothing happens and the UI gets blocked, so they can't do anything but restart the computer. It feels like when a modal window appears and blocks the page until you make a choice, except, there's no modal window.

To Reproduce

1. Go to System Settings -> Privacy & Security -> Files & Folders
2. In that window, check what folder is used by SEB for downloads.
3. Configure SEB to download into the other folder (if Files & Folders shows "Documents", configure to "Downloads", or vice versa)
4. Run a page in SEB and try to download a file

Expected behavior
It's critical for us to let them always download, so SEB should download files into the folder it has access to, even if it's different from the one configured in a link.

Screenshots
Below are the screenshots of SEB folder access settings on Macbook 1, Macbook 2 and Macbook 3 respectively (see Additional context).

Screenshots:

Log Files
org.safeexambrowser.SafeExamBrowser 2025-04-24--15-36-53-666.log
org.safeexambrowser.SafeExamBrowser 2025-04-24--15-38-23-934.log
org.safeexambrowser.SafeExamBrowser 2025-04-24--15-38-24-022.log

Version Information

• OS: MacOS 14, MacOS 15
• SEB Version 3.4.1

Additional Context
I have figured out that this is due to system settings: we configure SEB to save files to '~/Downloads', while SEB doesn't have access to this folder. In the System Settings -> Privacy & Security -> Files & Folders, I see that SEB has some time ago requested and received the access to the Documents folder (but not Downloads). After we changed the "downloadDirectoryOSX" to '~/Documents', file downloads worked for me. But this is not a solution, because we've tested this on 3 macbooks, and we got 3 different results:

SEB versions 3.4.1
Macbook 1: MacOS 15, SEB has access to Documents folder
Macbook 2: MacOS 14, SEB has access to Downloads folder
Macbook 3: MacOS 14, SEB has no access to any folder

And in these system settings, you can't choose a specific folder, it seems SEB has to request it, and it requests it differently on different machines. The only workaround is to ask students to grant SEB Full Disk Access for a duration of the exam.

This seems to be an issue for a while.

In the release notes, I see there were attempts to fix this:

• in SEB 3.3.2:
  • Fixed crash when downloading files.
  • Fixed: No error message was displayed when attempting to download/open SEB configurations while this is disabled.
• in SEB 3.2.4:
  • Fixed download directory bug from SEB 3.2.3 for macOS
  • Now also showing "Downloads not Allowed" alert in modern WebView if settings don't allow downloads and in one case for downloads in classic WebView on macOS.
  • Now checking if download directory is correctly set when performing download in WKWebView. If not, the Downloads directory is used.

But apparently, this is still an issue 😞