i'm new to mac so last night i d/l firefox worked great...now this morning i turned the mac on and no firefox i went into spotlight and found it there and seemed like it installed it again, so what would be my steps to save something i d/l
When you first downloaded FF, and a window opened with the FF logo w/an arrow pointing to a folder, did you drag that FF icon to your Application folder?
Once you do that, then you can drag the icon from your App folder to your Dock and it will stay there.
Downloading and installing files in OS X is a little different than Windows, but it's easy to get the hang of especially after doing it a couple of times.