Downloads Folder Holding All My New Program Downloads?

The "Downloads" folder for W10 is a little strange. I've ran W7 for years and new programs never went to the Downloads folder. W7 offers the choice of Save or Run and I always just selected Run, but Edge says Save or Save As, and you don't get the Run option till the next window.

I recently bought a W10 laptop and set it up using the Edge browser. Afterwards I discovered everything I had downloaded..... a printer driver, Kaspersky, Revo Pro, and MS Home & Student Word setup was all parked in my Downloads folder!

I thought this stuff was supposed to be somewhere back on the hard drive in Program files.
Once these programs are installed, do they still need to sit in your Downloads folder or can you safely delete them out?
Is the Downloads folder just a temporary parking place till the program is installed?

The installers for programs can be deleted or copied out of the downloads folder after they have been installed, though if you have the space you may want to keep the installers in case you need to re-install in future.

This will also depend on your download speed - A decent fibre download speed and a lack of disk space would make deleting after install the way to go, but a slow download connection and lots of disk space would lend itself to saving the installer.

The reason for the change from Internet explorer's option to run, from a temp directory, ( what actually happens with the run option), to the save option in Edge, (and I think in all other browsers), is that it is safer to download and perform a deep malware scan that to rely on the quick scan that is normally the best you can expect during download.

That's what I am assuming too - Developers are a funny breed and will sometimes decide to install their programs in non standard locations, ( this is almost a norm for games developers where they add their own folder tree to the root of the drive).

The installers are downloaded and run to install the program, The actual program files are, (by design anyway), placed in the Program Files or Program Files (x86) folders, this is for the 64 bit windows versions with the 32 bit programs located in the (x86) folder, the 32 bit version of windows only has a Program files folder.

Other parts of the majority of programs are scattered around various folder locations some visible and some hidden that contain user preferences Etc so a shared system can allow users their own settings.