Heck, I am just kidding; but it’s true for me at least that sometimes the Firefox download pop-up is a bit too in my face. I like all downloads to be behind the scenes and unobtrusive. I wouldn’t like to do away with the Firefox browser for this minor ‘inconvenience’.

Thankfully, the gallery of Mozilla Firefox add-ons lets me do away with just the download window by giving me three options to choose from.

These three add-ons go a long way in improving the download job by replacing the default download window.

Download Statusbar (v 0.9.6.5)

Download Statusbar saves screen real estate by handing the download job to the goodish little status bar. It’s a wonder of coding that the 445KB add-on packs in a lot within its small size. The add-on can be configured as a separate status bar (Full Mode) or kept within the Firefox status bar (Mini mode).

This is just one option within its quiver of configuration settings. Some other features are…

• Progress notifications give detailed information about downloads. Notifications can be switched on and off. Tooltip notifications add to instant feedback.



• Retain, remove or trim download history.
• Automatically continues downloads with the Firefox download manager, even if the main browser is closed. Pops up a confirmation alert when a download is halted or deleted.
• Pause and resume downloads with a single click (i.e. if downloads are resumable).



• Play a sound when the download finishes.
• Run a finished download with a double click.  Also one can open containing folder, visit source website, and rename the file.
• Appearance of the download status bar can be customized. For instance, Speed Colors allow you to visually appreciate how each download is progressing.



• Virus scanning using default anti-virus can be configured to automatic or manual. File type filters for scans can be set.



• The add-on auto hides when not in use.
• It is also available in 25 languages.

Download Statusbar is a recommended Firefox add-on. Alternatively, check it out at the Mozdev community site.

Custom Download Manager (v 2.1b90630)

The custom part of this add-on is that the user can choose to open the download in a separate tab, sidebar or a fresh window. Though it’s not feature rich as Download Statusbar it introduces some control over the process. User friendly customization features include…

• Decide the buttons, the look and their location with a few checkbox settings. Two important buttons which you can set are – Copy Download Link and Go to Download Page.
• Decide on the behavior of the download manager window. For instance, close the download manager when done.
• Set an alert for an exe file operation.
• Enable/Disable virus scan for a completed file.

Custom Download Manager is compatible with Mac OS X, Windows and Linux.

Downloads in Tab (v 0.0.9)

If you like your download control to be sans any frills, then this add-on fits the need. Downloads in Tab moves the job from the pop-up windows to a regular tab. It’s actually just a tab version of the pop-up. The features are also limited to the regular tab controls…

• Opens a tab automatically with a download and closes it when downloads are finished.
• You can move the download tab to the background by choosing the only from menu setting in the Options panel of the add-on.
• The download tab can be set to become the first tab of the browser window.

Downloads in Tab is an 18KB recommended download from Mozilla.

Karl has also taken us through 11 add-ons he can’t live without. You might want to check out his post for a brief mention of Download Statusbar and the nifty download manager/accelerator called Download Them All.

The three add-ons profiled here cover the gamut of download operations. From the bells and whistles of Download Statusbar to the plainness of Downloads in Tab. And somewhere in between we have the Custom Download Manager. We all have our requirements and thankfully a whole gallery of options to pick for them. Which is your pick of the heap?

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

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I could hear the murmurs among the members of the DD – Downloadaholic D’Anonymous. My heart beats faster. Still I continued, “I tried to stop, believe me I did. And I almost succeeded. You see, I’m crazy about downloading, but I really hate everything I had to go through to download the files.”

I paused again and glanced at the group leader. He nodded as a sign for me to continue. I cleared my throat and said, “What I really hate about this whole thing is that I had to manually manage all the downloaded files individually. And if there were hundreds of new files every week…”

Several people nodded, understood.

“Then why didn’t you stop?” asked the lady with a ponytail on my right.

I looked at her and said, “I met Folx Beta.”

An Automatic Download Manager

Even though each and every new modern browser has its own download manager (or plugin), nothing can beat the flexibility of a stand alone application. There are plenty of options for Windows, but for Mac users, Folx might be the best answer to the need for a free stand-alone download manager.

The first thing to do after downloading and installing the app is to go to the adjust some preferences. Go to Preferences (Command + Comma).

There are several tabs. We’ll start from General. Here, users can set things like the maximum active task, user agent, and connection type.

Then there’s the Folder tab where users can set the location of the downloaded files.

Unless you connect through proxy server(s), you can skip the Proxy tab and go directly to the next tab. The Scheduler tab would be very useful if you only connect at certain times or want your downloads to be active only at specific hours.

You can use the Speed tab to set different speed limits for individual browsers. To do that, you must set the Speed limit type to “Auto” because the options are greyed out when set at ‘Unlimited’.

From this Preferences window, we can see that there are two future download abilities that are still unavailable in this beta version: Torrent and ed2k.

Do the Download, dude!

Now for the fun part: downloading the files. If you set Folx’s preferences to automatically catch the download from your browsers, it will do just that. Another way is to select then drag and drop the link to the dropbox. You can move the location of the dropbox easily by dragging it.

By default, a New Task window will pop out every time a new download about to start. Users can adjust individual settings for each download – including adding tags to the file – from this window.

Everybody knows that tags are an important factor in good file management. It also opens other possibilities in managing the downloaded files, such as assigning Automator Actions to automatically move series of files with the same tags to a certain folder.

The New Task window is also the place to set how many segments (threads) of a file to be active at one moment. This option is important because some download servers only allow one active download segment.

This window may be deactivated in the preferences

For further information on the features, please read the Documentation.

Personally, I think this app is a nice free download manager and has the potential to be better.

Do you have alternatives to a free stand alone Mac download manager? Or do you prefer to use the built-in (or plugin) download manager in your browser? Share your thoughts below.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

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We’ve seen multiple applications, trying to expend the reach of Torrent clients and the like. The Vuze and xTorrent clients both implement the web in their applications, allowing you to browse torrents as well as downloading them.

However, why is it that the web should be integrated in a Torrent client? Why not integrating torrents into a web client? Well, Wyzo manages to do just that, and the results are astounding.

Wyzo – The Media Browser

Wyzo’s long-term aim is to make web browsing smarter and more enjoyable. They want the user to feel home and to have the tools he needs, at any given time.

Most of this reflects upon the ease of downloading, but doing so without repressing the global browsing experience.

The browser is based on Firefox, and many things remain the same. Other things however, got a real makeover. You can read about the features of the browser below.

New Look

This third version of Wyzo has been completely restyled. You’ll notice that the tabs and buttons have adapted a slick chrome-like appearance. It’s a professional-looking skin that’s easy on the eyes – nothing too graphical, like some of the things we see these days.

Torrent Downloads and Acceleration

In the area of downloading, Wyzo comes with two major trump cards; FireDownload and FireTorrent, two great addons developed by the guys behind Wyzo.

FireDownload is a simple download accelerator. It doesn’t do anything particularly fancy, except speeding up your downloads. A lot. By using multiple connections with the server, FireDownload can accelerate your downloads up to ten times their original speed.

FireTorrent handles, as you might’ve guessed, the torrent integration. All torrents are simply added to your browser downloads. You can download in multiple sessions, and seeding happens automatically. Using FireTorrent, torrents become as easy as direct downloads.

FireDownload and FireTorrents are also available as Firefox add-ons via FireAddons.com.

Search … Everything

Wyzo comes with a customized startpage, which allows you to search the interwebz for almost everything, including torrents, images, video, news, blogs and maps. Each section gives you access to multiple search engines (e.g. you can search for torrents on YouTorrent, Mininova, Vuze and Torrentz).

Loaded With Add-ons

Besides FireDownload and FireTorrent, Wyzo is pre-loaded with various other Firefox extenstions, that enhance the user’s browser experience.

Remember your OS’s alt-tab function? Ctrl-Tab does the same in your browser. It’s a slick and easy way to visually navigate between your open tabs.

Cooliris - previously covered on MakeUseOf – gives you a visual representation of web content. On supported sites, it crawls for pictures, videos and articles, and presents these as a picture wall. It’s an extremely beautiful, and addicting way to surf the web.

FireGestures allows you to perform simple actions through mouse gestures. Hold a trigger and draw simple shapes to navigate and interact with web pages. You can also add new gestures, by using user-scripts.

So what’s your take on Wyzo? What do you, or don’t you like about it? Tell us, and your fellow MakeUseOf readers, all about it in the comments section below!

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

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Orbit Downloader is much more than another simple download manager since it incorporates a set of features that definitely make it unique and useful. And of course I am not just talking about it being completely free; while this is undoubtedly an attractive feature, there is much more to Orbit than that.

A True Catcher

Something that has become usual in download managers since some time ago – I’ve seen this in Flashget for instance – is the ability to allow several connections per download. Not only does Orbit support this function, as well as pausing and resuming downloads, but it also integrates seamlessly to Internet Explorer, Chrome, Opera and Firefox, the latter through an add-on that is installed together with the application.

So far, nothing seems to be too innovative or special if compared to other download managers, but let me say that Orbit stands out for being a really light program with a truly user-friendly interface, suitable both for beginners and advanced users.

What caught my attention the most was that it caught more downloads than any other download software. In other words, it is able to work in websites which are in theory protected against this kind of software such as MegaUpload.

Just Get it!

Other features of Orbit Downloader worth mentioning are its ability to limit speed, streaming support and Flash downloads. When working with Orbit Downloader, it will automatically detect and download flash files (including FLV) from any website. This way, whether you’re browsing YouTube, Pandora, Myspace or Imeem, Orbit will download any multimedia file it detects. It also presents a P2P net which can potentially increase download speeds. However, I must say I have not been able to completely appreciate this feature so far.

Be Tidy!

Something that has truly helped me to overcome my anxiety problems and stop having my PC totally stuck for trying to download things at the same time is its scheduling function. Orbit Downloader allows you to schedule your downloads by day, time and frequency. You can even set it to turn off the computer once the download is complete.

To sum up, if you have had enough with the traditional download support of your browser and are quite tired of the same old programs, I would suggest you putting Orbit Downloader into orbit. And believe me, this is a program you will be happy to keep in your system tray.

Which download tool do you use and why?  Let us know in the comments.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

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Frankly speaking, as Internet speeds continue to increase, the loading times of webpages are becoming increasingly less of an issue.  The time saved simply by having a better, more user friendly and clear interface outweighs most gains garnered from a browser which simply loads faster.

Here are 5 excellent tips to make browsing even smoother and faster on Firefox.

1. How to save time by automatically loading the next page

Autopager is a Firefox extension which automatically loads up the next page of a series of web pages and displays it at the bottom of the screen, when you scroll to the end of the page.

For example, if you were to load up a Google Search, and you were unhappy with the page one results, you previously had to click on a link to take you to page 2 of the results.  With Autopager, all you do is scroll down – saving you the extra click.  Google’s page 2 results would now be appended at the bottom of the page 1 results.  Keep scrolling downwards and you’d see page 3, 4 and so on.

By default AutoPager works with a ton of sites, including the New York Times, Digg, and, of course, Google. If you want to add your own custom autopaging to unsupported sites, the site wizard feature makes it easy to so.  This extension is a true time saver.

2. How to use keyboard shortcuts to get instant results

Firefox comes with a whole range of keyboard shortcuts so you can really speed things up if you’re a power user. Mozilla lots of different shortcuts on their support page, and here are 5 cool keyboard tricks which would come in handy for all Firefox keyboard newbies:

• Back/Forward Navigation: Alt Left Arrow / Alt Right Arrow
• Complete .com Address : Ctrl+Enter (When you’re in the URL bar)
• Zoom In / Out: Ctrl + / Ctrl -
• Bookmark all tabs: Ctrl Shift D
• Undo closed tab: Ctrl Shift  T

MakeUseOf now gives away a printable Firefox chet sheet nicely summarizing the “need to know” shortcuts. Apart from Firefox, there are cheat sheets for Gmail, Windows, Mac OS X and several other.

3. How to NOT get bogged down by 404s

Your favorite website down? Rather than visiting it later, or hitting the refresh button incessantly, you can try installing ErrorZilla, a firefox extension which will add Try Again, Google Cache, Coralize, Wayback, Ping, Trace, and Whois buttons, when a website isn’t found or a web server is down.

Think of it as a much more useful 404 error page where rather than just telling you the page doesn’t exist – it allows you to search and visit cached versions of the page.

4. How to load up web pages faster

Fasterfox is an extension which dips under the hood to tweak many network and rendering settings such as simultaneous connections, pipelining, cache, DNS cache, and initial paint delay.

Previously, these were tweaks which you had to manually adjust – but now they work right out of the box once you use this handy extension.

5. How to download files faster

Originally skeptical when I first tried this out, I have been completely blown away by how effective this software is. DownloadThemAll is a free extension which acts as a download manager (meaning you can pause and resume downloads), and download files faster by having them simultaneously download.  This is quite possibly my favorite extension out of all five.

So there you have it, 5 speedy tips which will helpfully make your browsing on Firefox an even faster, more powerful experience.

What time saving browsing tips for Firefox do you have?  I’d love to hear about them in the comments!

Photo credit: LaiHiu

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

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Download managers are Godsend. They allow us to accelerate, manage and time all of our downloads.

One of the major features of a download manager or accelerator is the file splitting process. This splits the file into different chunks – sections – which it then downloads simultaneously. This can allow some downloads to go up to five or ten times faster.

Over the years, numerous file download managers popped up, but I was especially surprised to see how many free ones were available. So, enter my best best download managers for windows.

FlashGet

FlashGet is one of the most popular download managers available. Both themselves and their huge userbase have named them “The Best Download Manager Program”.

This download manager runs pretty low on system resources, hence the influence on your usual computing behaviour is limited to a bare minimum. All these downloaded files can be easily organised through various categories, so wave goodbye to your ever so messy desktop.

Anti-virus integration is also supported – this allows you to specify an anti-virus application and plan instant virus-scans on all your downloaded files.

However, FlashGet’s biggest power lies in protocol support. HTTP, FTP, BitTorrent, MMS and RTSP are just a handful of the supported protocols.

FlashGet is available for Windows, download it here. Version 2.00 available here.

Free Download Manager

Free Download Manager (FDM) is a 100% free, open-source program released under the GNU General Public License. This means that the source code can be accessed by everyone and improved versions can be made by the community.

Besides supporting the HTTP, HTTPS, FTP and BitTorrent protocols, the Free Download manager can also grab flash video content from various websites such as YouTube, Daily Media and Google Video.

The feature that makes the Free Download Manager stand out is getting a ‘community opinion’ on files. This means that you’ll see what other members of the community have to say about the file you’re about to download. Through this function, Free Download Manager tries to warn you for any malicious downloads.

Several other functions include a built-in upload manager to easily share your files with your friends, colleagues and family, a remote control option and portable installation support.

Free Download Manager is available for 32bit Windows, download it here.

Download Accelerator Plus

With 165 million users worldwide, Download Accelerator Plus is the market leader in download acceleration and management.

Several new features became available with the release of version 9.00. Download Accelerator Plus now features a YouTube downloader, similar to Free Download Manager. The Preview Function allows you to check the validity or quality of any unfinished video and audio files, and a free video converter allows you to put your downloaded videos in PSP and iPod format.

Download Accelerator Plus works with a Multi Antivirus security analysis to protect you from most malicious downloads.

The only problem with Download Accelerator Plus are their constant tries to promote the premium version.

Download Accelerator Plus is available for Windows, download it here.

Alternative Download Manager Freeware.

Of course the download manager arsenal isn’t limited to the above three applications. Below are other free download managers that didn’t manage to get featured but might be worth a look.

• Net Transport
• Fresh Download
• WackGet – a very minimalistic download manager

Which application do you use, and why? Do you know of any other options? Drop them in a comment below.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

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But what I hate most about this file sharing service is that – being one of the pioneers in the file sharing business – almost everybody uses Rapidshare and you can find almost everything there.  So we just have to grit our teeth and accept it as it is.

Or do we?

I’ve searched the web and actually found quite a few Rapidshare download managers which can overcome Rapidshare limitations (or at least some of the limitations) but not each and every one of them can be used ‘conveniently’ – some of them are not in English, some others are spyware, some can’t be downloaded.

So, here are only three slightly better-than-the-others choices which will make your ‘rapidsharing’ life easier. All for Windows only unfortunately. I wasn’t lucky enough to find anything for other OS’s. But no worries, you can still check out cool Rapidshare tools that we covered earlier.

Let’s assume that you already have the Rapidshare location of the file you want to download (if not, look at this Rapidshare search engine to give you a headstart). Therefore all that is left to do is to download the file conveniently with one of these tools:

1. RapGet

The first recommended app is RapGet. This is a small standalone Rapidshare download client – only around 200KB – which can help you download multiple files from Rapidshare if you have the Premium Account. But if you use the free account, it will download one file at a time, and automatically wait a specified period of time before attempting to download your next file.  So just enter all your Rapidshare URL’s and it will download them all for you one at a time.

Besides that, RapGet also supports 60 other file hosting services such as MegaUpload, Box.net and others which work similar to Rapidshare. All you need to do is enter your file hosting account login information.

2. RapidHarvest

If you are longing for a Rapidshare download manager with scripting ability, then maybe you’ve just found the solution.

You can add multiple links to be downloaded by using menu File –> Import –> From Text. This feature is very convenient for those who use Rapidshare regularly, as many of the large downloads are chunked into smaller files.

3. Rapidme

Rapidme is an all-in-one Rapidshare tool. You can share your links which you submitted on Rapidshare, Megaupload.com, and Sendfile.com. Rapidme also lets you search, rate and add links.

But even though Rapidme has no spyware, no adware, and is 100% free to use; it’s ad supported. It’ll show an advertising banner on the lower part of the window.   So it’s up to you whether that bothers you or not.

If you know any other unknown but good Rapidshare download managers, or know similar apps which work under Mac or Linux, please share them using the comments below.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

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