RWT Webmaster Tools Blog

Free Download Manager for Firefox

I’ve been recently frustrated by the lack of a good download manager for Firefox.  The download manager within Firefox is fine for single file downloads, though it has no resume or pause capability nor ability to capture multiple downloads at once. The download manager I currently use works only with IE and not Firefox (which is a separate issue).  So I went searching through the catalog of Firefox Add-ons and discovered DownThemAll!

DownThemAll! will find every link on a webpage and attempt to download the file that is associated with each link.  While it grabs links to HTML, ASP, and PHP pages, I find its main use is for downloading PDFs, MP3s and other large files (including executables).

I can grab the files I want in one of two ways.  DownThemAll! will find all possible files to be downloaded and I can select from the list which files I want.  I can also set up filters that will only find the files I am interested in.  For example, if I only want to download PDF and MP3 files off a website, I can set up a filter to do so.  The filters can be created very simply by telling DTA what file extensions to look for. Advanced users can setup regular expressions to create a filter. 

The other way I can download files is with DTA OneClick.   With  one click, DTA  recalls the last setting it used and will try to download the files on the current page with those settings. This is useful for tasks which require lots of downloading off of multiple pages/sites. 

One of the great things about a download manager is the ability to pause and resume downloads. I can pause a download, exit from Firefox, even shutdown my machine, and return later to the DTA Manager and resume the download.  This is especially helpful with very large files. There are times when I need the bandwidth to perform a certain task. I can pause the downloads, do the task, then pick up the downloads where they left off.

DTA has definitely made the “downloading” portion of my life much easier.

The screenshot below shows the file selection screen. I have my PDF filter on to capture only PDF files.

This screenshot demonstrates the download screen. It shows what files are downloading, how much of that file has been downloaded, estimated time left in the download and shows all files in queue.