DownThemAll (2019)

https://addons.mozilla.org/de/firefox/addon/downthemall/

by Tomte • 5 years ago

257 131 5 years ago

addons.mozilla.org

WalterGR• 5 years ago

"Last updated

2 years ago (Nov 26, 2019)"

forgotmypw176• 5 years ago

It's nice to see a finished piece of software.

schwartzworld• 5 years ago

For a downloader, that might be a bit of a bad sign. As pages like youtube change, downloader software code needs to change to keep up. See youtube-dl as an example.

whoopdedo• 5 years ago

I think it's more that DTA was a victim of FF Quantum.

We are therefore limited to the tools the WebExtensions model provides to us, which sadly makes it impossible to provide some of the advanced features of DownThemAll! Version 3.

I didn't even know they attempted a WebExtension rewrite and am not surprised that it wasn't able to do the things that made the old DTA worth using.

theandrewbailey• 5 years ago

A quick read in the reviews suggests that there are still bugs to be fixed.

pkrumins• 5 years ago

You mean abandoned software. Software is never finished.

amelius• 5 years ago

Meanwhile, Youtube-DL is continuously being updated, because they have to work around obstacles raised by Google to prevent automatic downloading.

rocky1138• 5 years ago

I used this years ago. Worked great.

unixhero• 5 years ago

A fantastic download manager.

jeroenhd• 5 years ago

Woah, this gives me flashbacks. I remember using this to download files from shady websites on the school computers in the Firefox 3.5 era.

These days, connections have become so fast that I don't really use a download manager anymore. The last place I download large files from through the browser is Mega, and its encryption is inherently incompatible with this addon.

DavidPeiffer• 5 years ago

I downloaded a good chunk of Gameboy and N64 ROM's from https://www.theoldcomputer.com/ around 2010. It was a very effective add-on.

Isthatablackgsd2• 5 years ago

Download Managers is still being used to this day. I have to use a download manager to download a 250MB file that capped the speed at 50KBps... And this is coming from a well-known but shitty printer company. So it took ages to down that and often it would failed. JDownloader2 took care of that since it can do multiple connection to do a quicker download.

If you need a download manager for MEGA, check into JDownloader2. They are compatible with MEGA en/decryption. And developers is very active.

Qub3d• 5 years ago

It might be more of an annoyance for the basic "I got a link to a file and I just want to download it" use case, but I use rclone's mega backend: https://rclone.org/mega/

rzzzt• 5 years ago

I took GetBot for a spin recently from my downloaded apps archive, but unfortunately it doesn't handle files above 2GB very well -- the remaining bytes/time counter goes nuts. Too bad, I liked its clipboard support where you could also paste a list of URLs it needs to go through.

notjulianjaynes• 5 years ago

I still use it in cases when a page links to a bunch of individual media files I want to download quickly and without making a complete mess of my downloads folder. Rare nowadays, but find it a lot on academic type websites.

Perfect example: https://www.ubu.com/sound/antin.html

ZoomZoomZoom3• 5 years ago

It's a nice extension, and there was a time when I used it frequently, but the thing is - it should be completely unnecessary.

I already have software which downloads anything I want fast, the issue is, I can't simply connect it to Firefox anymore. Same goes to using external players to view media (I need more nuanced control over rate and pitch of the playback).

I understand it's done in the name of security, but I refuse to accept there's no practical way to allow user to launch software on his own machine from the browser without some auxiliary intermediate program which some older extensions suggested as a way to continue working.

Sorry for the rant.

bertman• 5 years ago

Maybe have a look at these:

https://addons.mozilla.org/de/firefox/addon/aria2-integratio...

https://addons.mozilla.org/de/firefox/addon/ff2mpv/

ZoomZoomZoom3• 5 years ago

Thanks. The first one seems to rely on the fact that aria2 can be remotely controlled. This is good, and in case of aria2 may be even the preferred way of using the combo, but it's not the substitute for the basic launching of one program from the other with some data passing.

The second one needs the "native client" which I mentioned above. It uses effing python to pass the link from the browser to the player! It's a workaround and an ugly complication. The more I use technology the more I come to despise those levels of software strata solving the problem the lower layers introduced for disputable reasons.

brunoqc• 5 years ago

Thanks.

The aria2 one didn't have an update since 2019 though.

Berazu• 5 years ago

May we know what software you use?

wesapien• 5 years ago

Are you talking about jdownloader2?

FinalBriefing• 5 years ago

If the app supports deep linking, then a browser can open up content in an app. See most video conference links.

I imagine a browser extensions that adds deep-links for certain media to be opened in external software is possible. Just needs coordination with the app...

badsectoracula2• 5 years ago

You can use Firefox Developer Edition and make your own addon. It isn't exactly straightforward, especially the "communicate with external software" part (e.g. in Windows you need to put some entry in the registry to let Firefox know what program you need to communicate with) and communication has to be via JSON which in practice means you need to write some sort of proxy app.

But it is possible. I have made my own little addon that calls yt-dlp (previously youtube-dl) with the current URL to save videos from YouTube and other supported places (e.g. Reddit) with a single click. The addon communicates with a Python program to send it the current page's URL which in turn just changes to a predefined directory (where downloaded videos are stored) and calls yt-dlp with that URL.

I was a bit hesitant at first to bother with all that but eventually i decided that it is "my browser" so i should be able to do whatever i want with it and certainly adding a button to call a program with the current URL should be more than possible.

The downside is that Developer Edition updates way more often than regular Firefox which in theory might break stuff but personally i never had an issue with it.

maxwelldone• 5 years ago

Any specific reason to use FF dev edition? You can use your own addon with regular FF by signing it with web-ext CLI tool.

chheplo• 5 years ago

We are still talking about Download Manager in 2021. Something went wrong somewhere.

rcMgD2BwE72F• 5 years ago

What's wrong with download managers?

Should I only use the one provided by my Web browser? Should I not download the content that I want to access locally or share between devices without being obliged to stream/download it again from a server?

vdfs• 5 years ago

There also some websites that throttle your download speed, you can fix that by using parallel download of same file.

einpoklum3• 5 years ago

The thing is, a browser is already "managing" downloads. If browsers implemented their internal download management reasonably, people would mostly not need to bother with an extension.

klntsky• 5 years ago

Batch downloads are still useful.

ajsnigrutin• 5 years ago

It's not just a download manager!

Imagine a page with 50 links, that you each have to download by hand? Nope! Just DTA and a filter to choose what you want.

Photo gallery? Same!

Open a bunch of stuff in different tabs, and want to download the same thing (eg. .zip file) from each open tab... DTA all tabs, and *.zip filter.

Regex filter? Sure!

The basic download manager part is just an extra feature, that you usually don't need.

layer8• 5 years ago

Still, one could reasonably expect that applying a functional pipeline to web page contents (extract and filter links, pipe them into the download queue) should be regular web browser functionality.

Isthatablackgsd2• 5 years ago

Yes, they are still useful. Download managers can download specific range of files that we are only interested in which it can be filtered out. Like youtube-dl and gallery-dl, they are a specialized download manager and did amazing job with it.

If I find a gallery of images that I like to keep. I can use gallery-dl for that and use gallery-dl "instagram.com/boburnham" in the command line and it will crawl and download the images within the gallery.

srvmshr• 5 years ago

This was seriously the only Download manager (for bulk downloads) that I used for a long time.

vishnu2pc• 5 years ago

Go-to download manager back when I still had dialup and 128k later. Made downloading stuff somewhat tolerable

aeonflux• 5 years ago

What is the point of this link? Also - why does it links to the german version of addons page?

rakamotog• 5 years ago

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/downthemall/ Here is english link

U8dcN7vx• 5 years ago

I dislike this, trend it seems, of putting the language in the URL -- the Accept-Language HTTP header should be used which can express weighted preferences. Mozilla does use the header but redirects to the language (and product) specific URL which is usually okay for me but bad for sharing (IMO, obviously). But, https://addons.mozilla.org/addon/downthemall/ "works".

pcf• 5 years ago

Personally I still use JDownloader for everything, also to download source files for video streams.

vvilliamperez• 5 years ago

Back in the days of dial-up https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Download_Accelerator_Plus used to help a bunch too.

siva_• 5 years ago

I just wish we could add a delay in-between downloads so as not to hammer servers or run into 429 errors. An older version had this capability.

steffoz• 5 years ago

Wow. Didn't expect this :) I was the author of this tiny extension back in the days (extension #201, I still remember it) together with a friend who recently passed away, Federico Parodi.

We hacked the first version when we still didn't know much about JS, but it immediately exploded (500k daily users). Donations were super helpful at that time, being 22 years old with a newborn.

After a couple of years (iirc) Nils Maier joined the team and helped us a lot. Years later he managed to transition the codebase to the new web extension tooling that was introduced by Firefox a few years ago.

This little extension really shaped my professional career. The realization that something I made could have such an impact is what gave me the drive to keep creating small indie products, which I'm still doing nowadays with http://www.datocms.com

Thanks for making my day! :)

_fat_santa• 5 years ago

Thanks for making this. I remember downloading ROM's back in high-school. This made downloading way way easier.

XiS• 5 years ago

Thank you very much for creating this extension, I used it a lot back in the day!

pionar• 5 years ago

Thanks so much for making this. I used this back in the day to download (legally) mp3s from friends' pages.

Tijdreiziger• 5 years ago

Thanks for making this! I too used it back in the day. I thought the project died with WebExtensions, good to hear it's back.

tn1236• 5 years ago

I (Nils) was the maintainer of it for many years at the point already, and I was genuinely considering to let it die for quite a while. I was furious at what mozilla did to the loyal and active extension community and especially on how they did it - essentially by decree without community interaction at all. I was part of the mozilla volunteer army, not just with DownThemAll! and a few other more minor extensions, but I also had been on the team reviewing add-on submissions - I think I reviewed something like 2000-2500 individual submissions including updates in the end - and contributed a few minor bits to Firefox itself. The carelessness of how mozilla approached this large chunk of their community, after declaring their "1 million mozillians" goal not too long before, was mindblowing to me.

I eventually decided not to let it die... DownThemAll! had been a big part of my life, and while I recognized that I had to dumb down the feature set, I saw a way to at least make the core stuff work, maybe. I am glad I tried it even though it required a considerable amount of time to fully rewrite this thing.

The net result of mozilla's move was that they killed a large number of useful extensions entirely, while the survivors then usually became available for Chrome as well thanks to the mostly shared API - DownThemAll! is available for Chrome as well right now - giving users even less incentive to stay with Firefox. Oh well.

tandr• 5 years ago

Thank you for such a time-saving extension! I got much more time to read while it was doing what it was doing, instead of endless "right-click, save as" sequences.

BeetleB• 5 years ago

Another thanks. I used this addon heavily.

Saint_Genet• 5 years ago

I pirated so many low-res seasons of tv shows with this tool.

approxim8ion• 5 years ago

Many thanks to you. This extension was a darling of mine for a really long time, and brought me much joy.

rainboiboi• 5 years ago

Whoa, never thought I can put in a word of thanks directly to the creator of DownThemAll. Thank you for your contribution - this made my teenager days much more fulfilling. =)

calacatta• 5 years ago

+1. DTA + Usenet = happy days

tn1236• 5 years ago

Hi Stefano, Nils here, long time no see.

Yeah, it was 2006 when I joined you and Federico, if I remember correctly, while you and Federico started DownThemAll! in 2004. #201 is correct :D

2006 was really a long time ago...

DownThemAll! went through a lot of revisions since that time, including the work it took to make it restartless, then make it compatible with "electrolysis" and so on. And in the meantime ensure it didn't break with every Firefox release. But at the core the functionality kept the same. People contacting me with questions could be quite overwhelming - and I am sorry if some of you HN'ers mailed me and I didn't answer - but it was very enjoyable to see what different kinds of people were using our creation and get in touch with all kinds of folks that way, from students downloading lecture videos to movie editors downloading the "dailies", and everything in between.

I am still not happy mozilla decided they had to break all extensions, and I had to do a full rewrite as a WebExtension, and thus abandon a lot of features that simply are not possible anymore with that new API, while at the same time reinvent the wheel for the UI (now being forced to use vanilla HTML, which can be quite hard to get performant enough when people queue a couple of tens of thousands downloads at once). But the very core of functionality, namely selecting and queuing up a lot of links quickly, is still there, so I hope some people still find this new DownThemAll! WebExtension useful.

Lastly, while the last release was indeed 2 years ago, I keep meaning to fix some bugs and make a new release. I was already planning to set aside a lot of time this month for that, even before seeing DTA pop up on HN again. I guess this HN post can only motivate me more :D

Federico's death was incredibly sad. We only met once in person, but he was such a nice and humble guy, not just in real life but online too. I miss him too, may he rest in peace.

wackget• 5 years ago

As a life-long Firefox user who has been increasingly angry with Mozilla's direction for the browser for the past ten years, I honestly don't know how developers like you could put up with it.

Trashing an entire swathe of extensions - hundreds of thousands of man-hours of work - and then making breaking changes in nearly every subsequent version after that... it's precisely why I've never even considered making a browser extension. It would be pure hell.

einpoklum3• 5 years ago

I am still not happy mozilla decided they had to break all extensions

Actually, the weird thing - for those who see FF or TB from the inside - is that the same kind of code we have in regular extensions is still what's used in FF and TB's own chrome (which is in many ways like a bunch of "core extension"). They haven't changed things in a way which makes using extensions impossible, they simply removed the loading mechanisms for them.

Interestingly, for Thunderbird, there's a loophole which most popular extensions use, that allows them to keep loading and running the same kind of extension code they always have:

https://github.com/thundernest/addon-developer-support/tree/...

https://github.com/thundernest/addon-developer-support/issue...

jinto36• 5 years ago

Thanks! This extension was great for archiving materials from MOOCs (Coursera and such) for future reference. Also finding it useful for retrieving a bunch of things from some collections on Internet Archive, where their previews don't work or are broken, etc.

CodeMage• 5 years ago

Thanks for making DTA! I used it a lot back in the day.

billwashere• 5 years ago

Thank you! You made my dial-up connection usable.

errantspark• 5 years ago

Thank you so much for this! It was truly a lifesaver for a young pirate. My dad blocked torrents on our home network and I hadn't yet learned enough linux to crack our neighbors WEP DownThemAll was key to pirating games and movies off 20+ part rapidshares. <3

jokethrowaway• 5 years ago

That's funny, my internet provider (funky little wireless provider for people who live on mountains) was blocking torrents which made me gravitate towards rapidshare et similia as well.

Incidentally, I wrote several premium link makers back in the day (including one particular implementation which I tried to sell and pirates leaked - oh well, that's what you get when trying to sell to pirates) and I don't remember rapidshare allowing you to download things directly, unless you were premium.

anoncow2• 5 years ago

Thank you for making the internet that much more usable. I would install Firefox and DTA on all machines I configured back in the day.

jonathanlb• 5 years ago

Thank you for helping to make the Internet a delightful experience.

desi_ninja• 5 years ago

as a ardent user of the plugin back in 2008-09, I want to say thank you all who made it possible

danijelb• 5 years ago

Thank you so much for the extension. It was a real life saver back then

5F7bGnd6fWJ66xN• 5 years ago

You are doing God's work. Thank you. I've used your extension almost everyday for many years now. Simple to use!

causality0• 5 years ago

Your extension is why I still have a copy of Firefox 56 installed on my desktop. It makes the webextension version look crippled in comparison.

andrecarini• 5 years ago

Thanks for making my day! :)

No, thank YOU for building and maintaining DTA for all of us, even after the webext framework overhaul! Been a happy user since the old days.

febed• 5 years ago

Your extension is one of the only reasons I keep Firefox installed, thank you.

thecleaner• 5 years ago

I used this extension to download lecture pdfs. Really good stuff. Also the CMS product page looks slick.

alienthrowaway• 5 years ago

Thank you for authoring DTA! I was a student with no personal computer, and our 3rd world computer labs' download speeds maxed out at about 3kbps and would drop all the time. I had Portable Firefox on a USB disk(thanks John T. Haller) with DTA, which meant I could dare to download live Linux ISOs over some days, which would have been otherwise impossible; live Linux was the hot new thing then. My heartfelt thanks to you, Federico and Nils.

AnnoyedComment• 5 years ago

Thanks for creating this! Great work, and saves so much time.

SavantIdiot• 5 years ago

I'll be the brave one to say it: download entire image-based porn sites in one click. Porn has gone almost entirely video now, so the days of galleries have largely disappeared. There were auto-indexers as well that would increment URLs based on patterns.

ivanmontillam• 5 years ago

Or download entire 4chan threads. At least the images.

nsonha• 5 years ago

I did this as a teenager, also entire vBB porn thread, paginated. I basically learned web scrapping after DTA didn't cut it.

beardyw• 5 years ago

IIRC when I couldn't use DTA anymore I used to take a local copy of a page, change 'a' tags to 'img' tags and 'href' to 'src', and then save web page complete. Got me a folder with the downloads in it. Rough and ready!

thrower123• 5 years ago

There was nothing more frustrating than trying to download a file of a few megabytes back in the long, long ago, and then something would glitch out at 90%, and you'd have to start over again on your dial-up connection. Download managers that could resume an interrupted download were a game changer.

Modern browsers still suck at dealing with downloads if you have a flaky connection that gets interrupted, but we mostly don't care because you can slurp gigabytes in seconds on fiber connections, so it takes a really, really jacked up VPN connection or intrusive proxy to make an impact.

mixmastamyk• 5 years ago

Don't know where you live but gigabit fiber is nowhere to be found in these parts.

The game changer(s) were when browsers implemented resumable downloads, and most giant file distribution moved to torrents.

generationP• 5 years ago

Wow, I hadn't expected this to come back given the wind and weather of the present internet! I routinely used this back in the early 2010s, but then I switched to wget (and Chrome) as Firefox destroyed the plugin by changing its addon language.

havkd• 5 years ago

I used this a lot back in the day. I remember that I would always read the name as “download the mall”.

benbristow• 5 years ago

I've been using this for decades. Originally I pirated it when I was younger but recently bought a lifetime licence (very affordable!) and it's genuinely a great tool if you're on Windows. Does help download speeds too if you're on an ISP where single thread speeds can be a bit rubbish (Virgin Media in the UK). Gets updated often too.

https://www.internetdownloadmanager.com/

jsrcout• 5 years ago

I was a very happy user of DownThemAll at work for a few years. I had to retrieve boatloads of documents from $BIGCO's godawful Sharepoint site on the regular. After a couple sessions wearing out my carpal tunnel mousing around, right clicking on icons, and going through the File Save dialog hundreds of times, I knew there had to be a better way. DownThemAll was that better way. Thank you for your work.

kinnth• 5 years ago

The comments in this thread are a pleasure to read :)

DownThemAll (2019)

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