I have Linux Mint 17.3 Cinnamon, with Firefox 60.0.2.

What GUI downloader that works with Firefox would people recommend?

I have just installed uGet, but I have not managed to get it to load any urls or do anything. The "help" videos are rambling and say nothing about this essential and fundamental task.

The downloader must have a GUI please, and work with Firefox.

Thanks.

Is there something wrong with the firefox downloader? What do you need a downloader to do exactly? Downloadthemall is pretty good, but is made for a specific purpose.

If you mean DownThemAll!, sadly it isn't compatible with Firefox Quantum.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/fir...n/downthemall/

That's what I meant. Yeah, quantum really changed add-ons.

The move to Quantum hasn't been a painless one, that's for sure.

"What do you need a downloader to do exactly?"

In no particular order, to be able to queue downloads, to start and stop big downloads if this is possible, to resume broken downloads if possible, to grab all the downloading links off a webpage, to download at the fastest possible speed, to have the option of throttling downloads if I am busy doing other surfing, to be able to download difficult to get files. And to be able to pause the downloading queue and to remember and be able to resume downloading the queue after I have turned the computer off and then hours or days later turned the computer back on and restarted the downloader.

DownthemAll! did most of those as far as I am aware.

In Firefox, I use and would recommend the add-on Download Star 1.0.2. It does not do everything that DownThemAll! used to do, but it does do by far the most important thing: it grabs all the downloads off a webpage and downloads them. I wish it could be throttled to say five downloads at a time rather than downloading 100 downloads on a webpage all at once.

In Windows a downloader I liked was called "Vity's FreeRapid Downloader" which would do everything in the list above, including grabbing download urls from a webpage. I am doubtful it would work through Wine.

I have read that Opera 12 has a built-in downloader, I assume in later versions as well. I have not tried it yet.

After also installing Aria2 I found that uGet would work if I copy individual download urls. Similarly with Fatrat, which I found installed on my computer. But neither of them can, as far as I am aware, grab all the download urls off a webpage.

Update: I now see that Vity's FreeRapid Downloader does cater for Linux. I am unused to installing Linux things from .zip files. The zip file has a .sh file in it for Linux installation, and I understand that this requires some extra jiggery pokery before it can be used. So unless someone would like to provide step by step instructions it is too complicated for me to install.

There is no way to provide you instructions if all we know is it needs 'jiggery pokery'.

"There is no way to provide you instructions if all we know is it needs 'jiggery pokery'."

Other people know different things to yourself, such as how to prepare a .sh file to allow installation in Linux. In other words, some people will know how to do the "jiggery pokery". If one of these people happens to look at this post, and feels in the right mood, then they may be kind enough to provide instructions about how to do the jiggery pokery.

I kinda doubt, given the information provided, that it will be possible. But uGet is probably the closest thing to what you want: http://ugetdm.com/documentation/tutorials

I guess I don't understand the issue. My Firefox 60.0.2 manages downloads just fine out of the box, with no add-ons.
I've never needed to use an add-on to Firefox to manage downloads.

my thougths precisely.
however to some people who are constantly downloading from commercial sites that cap your bandwidth if you don't open an account with them, it might bring a few percent improvement (parallel downloads etc.). then again i guess that these commercial sites are well aware of these tactics and know to circumvent them...
mostly snake oil then... ah well... :sigh:

I think the download-manager concept comes from Windows, at a time when people used 56.6k modems for Internet, and so they queued downloads to run overnight.



I have the cheapest package my ISP offers, and it's 100mbit/s. So I just don't understand the need for a dl manager either.

I too have never needed anything like this, but if you must, you must!

Download the zip file. Navigate to it in the file manager. Double-click on it to open it with the archive manager. Drag the folder from the archive manager into the file manager. Open the folder to see the name of the shell file. Open a terminal and type
That sould do it, but no guarantees are offered.

To answer my own question, the Firefox add-on "Turbo Download Manager (v2)" usually uses two download threads rather than one and seems to download large files more quickly. It works with the 63.03 Quantum version of Firefox that I am using.

The only quibble is that it waits until after it has downloaded something before it asks you where you want to save it. This means that it does not tell you if you have forgotten that you have already downloaded the same file already, and that it is less convenient to get it to download several large files in parallel and then leave the computer running unattended while you go and do something else.