DownThemAll!

Rated 3 out of 5 stars

by JQP1 on June 11, 2008 · permalink

Not yet a full-featured or mature downloader. It has features that set it ahead of the rest, but it's still not ready for prime time. There is no reliable system (or any system, really) for tracking downloads; user must always be ready to say bye-bye to every download in his list if Firefox or DTA burps. Along the same lines, resume doesn't really work. As mentioned by others, DTA won't retry, you have to do that yourself. Also, DTA won't detect duplicate downloads so you have to be careful if you're downloading large numbers of files (say, image galleries). All of these things are more crucial for dialup users, which I don't think get any consideration from the devs (not a unique flaw, BTW). Thankfully the old file limit bug seems to be gone (if you queued up more than one or two thousand files (happens more often than you may think if you're a dialup user and a photo junkie who queues up files for overnight downloading!) DTA would regularly crap out on you).

I hope these issues are resolved soon, because otherwise DTA is quite nice (its entire appeal is based on integration with FF, but that's nothing to sneeze at given the total lack of competition).

Then again, I hope the FF team gets a clue and decides to build in all the features of DTA, plus the ones I mention, and any of the standard downloader features I've forgotten into FF standard builds so this whole silly problem can just go away.