Jan 15, 2008

Just wanted to let you know about a very cool FireFox extension called DownloadThemAll! It is a download manager / accelerator that is built right into FireFox. It has contextual menus so that you can right click a link and immediately start downloading, or you can queue up downloads, etc. While that is neat, the feature that I was looking for was the acceleration. By downloading multiple chunks of a file at the same time, the overall speed of your download is greatly increased.

I started downloading a 1.76GB game demo and I.E. was giving me 50K / sec download. 50K ??? What the heck? So, I looked for an accelerator that would fit in the browser. After installing DownloadThemAll! ? I was getting anywhere from 400 - 1800K / sec. Dang! Pretty nice speed boost. I left mine on the default 5 parts at a time so as to not be too rude to the file server. In fact, check out this screen cap of sustained 1.7 megabytes per second download:

Of course, your mileage may vary based on your Internet connection, file size, server speed, network congestion, black cat crossing your path or gremlins on the wire. Still, I’m pretty happy with this little piece of software. The price sure was right: FREE!

FireFox Add-on, DownloadThemAll!, download accelerator