Many months ago we were discussing how relevant download managers are these days. Although for the most part I’ve found Firefox’s default download manager to be sufficient, recently I decided to give DownThemAll! a try; and was in for a surprise. This free Firefox extension and full-featured download manager makes speeding up, queuing, and resuming downloads a breeze.

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I've been using DTA since I came to FF. Great add on and pretty powerful.

There are some websites around with "no leeching" policies. This could be a tool that might run afoul of that. I've even seen "we'll block your IP", and "legal action" mentioned. All bark and no bite, dunno! or ?

All these extensions and Add-Ons to Firefox slow an already slow browser. While people with 100Mbps broadband may say the downloads are quick, consider those of us with 384kbps who consider this speed "fast" (when compared with dial-up). Plus, Firefox 3.5.1 has some major coding errors and uses up far too much RAM. I have moved to Flock for this very reason.

thats what i was wondering too if captaincranky concern was valid or not, doesn't this violate some media regulation?

Download managers DO speed things up by even more than 400% on some connections. It all depends on your ISP. People don't seem to grasp the basic things about this technology.

A download manager opens multiple connections to the same server, to exploit the maximum bandwidth allowed by your ISP. A DSL user might not get much out of it, since the ISP isn't really capping one threaded transfers.

But let me tell you my story. I'm a cable user and my ISP caps one-thread transfers. I get about 2-300 KB/sec on outside transfers using Firefox's built-in manager and about 3-4 MB/sec (no typo here) using a download manager that opens a 12 threaded connection (or 12 individual connections, if you will). As you can see, it's a vital tool for me, and probably for many others like me.

And about the legal aspect... Of course it doesn't violate any regulations. It's the site owner's responsability to limit transfer speeds should they choose to, by allowing single threaded transfers only. Many "upload your file here" sites do that. I don't think I'm breaking any laws when I'm using this feature on sites that ALLOW it. If they have a problem with it, they're free to change their configuration files and block it.