Reviews for Download Manager (S3)
Download Manager (S3) by Oleksandr
Review by HuntingForPerfectExtensions
Rated 2 out of 5
by HuntingForPerfectExtensions, 4 years agoI want to love this add-on. It is like, 70% there to be the perfect lightweight download addon for people who don't want to use an addon that requires an external application and don't need anything too complicated.
However, in addition to missing a few features I would really prefer to have, I found thee major bugs (well, one is arguably not a bug, just undesirable behavior that cannot be changed):
1. I think this was triggered by intentionally crashing the browser, since I'm a tabaholic and browser crashes are a fairly common occurrence and one of the reasons I want an addon that helps with resuming downloads. If a download is PAUSED, this addon seems to handle resuming no problem. But if it is CANCELED, and you use the retry feature, it will ignore the intended filename and use whatever filename was used locally on the source site. Sometimes these are the same, but very often (especially with, ahem, adult video sites) this is not. There is no way to easily copy the 'correct' filename and manually paste it to replace the one it uses instead. If you want to download that file again with the correct name and it's too long for typing it in manually to be practical, you're gonna have to go to the download page and just start it again.
2. The download bar can become completely inaccurate and miss several active downlods. The Ctrl-J screen shows them, they are in fact downloading, but they are not listed in the bar and not even included in the total download rate shown on the bar. This may be related to handling browser crashes and restores badly, I'm not sure.
3. The queue mode doesn't actually work. Again, this may be related to it losing track of some downloads on crash/restore, but I had queue mode set to download 2 things at a time, and it seemed to work at first, but after some testing I realized 4 things were downloading simultaneously.
In addition to these issues, there are a couple missing features many other download addons have that would be welcome here:
* a one click context menu option to start downloads
* an option to auto-select download locations by some preset criteria, the most obvious being source URL, file type, or if you wanna get really fancy, matching filenames to regular expressions
* a quicker way to skip duplicate downloads than going through the usual process of hitting "save link as", trying to save, getting a confirmation about the duplicate filename, canceling from the confirmation, then canceling AGAIN to close the primary 'save' window. I realize I'm just blaming the addon for default FF behavior, but this is default behavior a lot of download managers improve and this one does not.
CONCLUSION: this is probably great for casual users who just want to keep easier track of downloads and add a few useful features like checksumming. But it has some serious bugs preventing many of its features from actuallly being reliable, and is missing key pieces of other DL managers that make it ill suited for someone who likes to qeueue lots of files and wants an add-on that makes this process more convenient and resumes still queued downloads at a later time more elegantly. If the bugs were fixed and my only objections were missing features I'd give this a 4, but with the single most advertised and, to most users, probably important element, the download bar, having major bugs I found within minutes... Sorry, I gotta be harsh.
However, in addition to missing a few features I would really prefer to have, I found thee major bugs (well, one is arguably not a bug, just undesirable behavior that cannot be changed):
1. I think this was triggered by intentionally crashing the browser, since I'm a tabaholic and browser crashes are a fairly common occurrence and one of the reasons I want an addon that helps with resuming downloads. If a download is PAUSED, this addon seems to handle resuming no problem. But if it is CANCELED, and you use the retry feature, it will ignore the intended filename and use whatever filename was used locally on the source site. Sometimes these are the same, but very often (especially with, ahem, adult video sites) this is not. There is no way to easily copy the 'correct' filename and manually paste it to replace the one it uses instead. If you want to download that file again with the correct name and it's too long for typing it in manually to be practical, you're gonna have to go to the download page and just start it again.
2. The download bar can become completely inaccurate and miss several active downlods. The Ctrl-J screen shows them, they are in fact downloading, but they are not listed in the bar and not even included in the total download rate shown on the bar. This may be related to handling browser crashes and restores badly, I'm not sure.
3. The queue mode doesn't actually work. Again, this may be related to it losing track of some downloads on crash/restore, but I had queue mode set to download 2 things at a time, and it seemed to work at first, but after some testing I realized 4 things were downloading simultaneously.
In addition to these issues, there are a couple missing features many other download addons have that would be welcome here:
* a one click context menu option to start downloads
* an option to auto-select download locations by some preset criteria, the most obvious being source URL, file type, or if you wanna get really fancy, matching filenames to regular expressions
* a quicker way to skip duplicate downloads than going through the usual process of hitting "save link as", trying to save, getting a confirmation about the duplicate filename, canceling from the confirmation, then canceling AGAIN to close the primary 'save' window. I realize I'm just blaming the addon for default FF behavior, but this is default behavior a lot of download managers improve and this one does not.
CONCLUSION: this is probably great for casual users who just want to keep easier track of downloads and add a few useful features like checksumming. But it has some serious bugs preventing many of its features from actuallly being reliable, and is missing key pieces of other DL managers that make it ill suited for someone who likes to qeueue lots of files and wants an add-on that makes this process more convenient and resumes still queued downloads at a later time more elegantly. If the bugs were fixed and my only objections were missing features I'd give this a 4, but with the single most advertised and, to most users, probably important element, the download bar, having major bugs I found within minutes... Sorry, I gotta be harsh.