Firefox Download Still Sucks, At Least It RecoversJune 30th, 2008 Firefox download manager is still flaky, even after three major versions. Often the download stops for no apparent reasons.
8 Tricks to Experience A Faster, Better and Compact Firefox Download ManagerOctober 14th, 2008 The download manager of Firefox is one of the most advanced features of a modern internet browser. From the age old Windows' default download options in Internet Explorer to Opera or Maxthon's improved download managers, we have seen them all.
How to Choose Download Location for Firefox Download ManagerDecember 16th, 2008 This is a very simple trick and most of you know about it already. For those who don't, its a real pain to see Firefox browser downloading any file to your desktop by default.
Share Firefox and Be Immortalized in Firefox 2July 17th, 2006 Share Firefox with a friend. If your friend downloads Firefox before September 15, you’ll both be immortalized in Firefox 2.
How To Run Multiple Firefox Instance From Different Accounts in LinuxSeptember 2nd, 2007 In Linux, unlike Windows, multiple users can simultaneously connect to the same machine and get a full GUI using windows managers like VNC. However when one of the account has Firefox opened, others are prevented from bringing up firefox which can be very much irritating.
How to Change Default Download Location for Firefox BrowsersSeptember 7th, 2005 Problem
Firefox downloads any file to desktop by default. This soon leads to a cluttered desktop.
Firefox 1.5 ReleasedNovember 30th, 2005 Firefox 1.5 has finally been released with tons of new features. Here's what's new in Firefox 1.5:
* Automated update to streamline product upgrades.
Script to Kill and Restart Non-responding Firefox AutomaticallyMarch 27th, 2009 As its now official that Firefox has more bugs than IE, Safari and Chrome combined, we have more reasons to be worried about its stability while we are doing any web based work. Talk of dependence and there we have it on Firefox because others are just not upto it.
Firefox patches critical security vulnerabilities in 1.04May 12th, 2005 A discussion on the update and how to install it.
My blog readers prefer Mozilla browsers on Windows!February 10th, 2005 My blog readers prefer Mozilla based browsers, which is used by 51.21%. IE is lagging behind at 39.08%!
On the other hand my readers prefer Windows with Windows XP alone accounting for 51.48%.
Firefox claims billion downloadsAugust 1st, 2009 SAN FRANCISCO - Internet surfers have downloaded the open source Firefox browser more than one billion times, the software's distributor, the Mozilla Foundation, said Friday. The browser is the strongest current rival to Microsoft's Internet Explorer, which once controlled over 90 percent of the browser market but has seen its dominance steadily eroded by Firefox.
Firefox Woes: Memory Leaking, Hanging, Incorrect Rendering etc.December 16th, 2005 Firefox has its own share of troubles. If I happen to open few sites with Flash advertisements on them and leave it open for some time, Firefox gobbles up most of the memory and becomes dog-slow.
5 Must-Have Firefox Add-ons for Web Development & QAJune 24th, 2008 These add-ons are so useful that I cannot work for a single day without them and so I would suspect most web developers and QA Engineers. These plugins / add-ons makes Firefox a formidable web development and testing platform.
Firefox 3.5.1 fixes serious security flawsJuly 17th, 2009 Mozillla releases Firefox 3.5.1 update version for Windows, Mac, and Linux on Tuesday. This new version claims a fix for critical security hole and available in more than 70 different languages.
Learn How to Develop Extensions for Firefox 1.5 and Later; Participate in FireFox Extension Development ContestNovember 5th, 2005 Firefox 1.5 introduced two new features which drastically simplify extension development - the greatly simplified chrome registration scheme and reworked Extension Manager. Read this article to get started with extensions development.
February 1st, 2005 at 11:57 pm
Well, go file a bug report then.
February 5th, 2005 at 1:22 pm
I had a whole comment typed out how this happens to me all the time, how it was happening RIGHT NOW AND YOUR VALIDATION CODE WAS UNREADABLE SO I LOST THE WHOLE COMMENT. I think I hate captcha as much as firefox.
<moderated for Slang - Editor>
March 8th, 2005 at 7:10 am
since 3 days I work with Firefox, replacing Netscape 7. All works well, with the exception of downloads. The download- manager opens and after a while reaches a deadlock. The only thing I can do is ctrl-Alt-Del. In the Headerline I can see the meassage PS: 603.3 MB. There seems to be no way to cancel downloads! Even saving files to my harddisk does no work, because of this deadlock of the downloadmanager! What can be the reason, please?
March 16th, 2005 at 6:06 pm
fully corroborate your opinion, and have to add:
It doesnt support download of more then two files even from different sources, cannot download lists, resume as a rule is broken, in a nutshell it goes in the same groove as microsoft only with a difference that you are incapable to install other managers that work smoothly with firefox and cover those lacks
March 17th, 2005 at 8:18 pm
Nowadays I actually copy the final download URL and feed it to DAP!
Not only does Firefox download fails, it also hangs and doesn’t recover.
April 12th, 2005 at 4:05 am
Hmmmm. Thats weird. I have never really had any problems with FF download, and frequently download huge files from multiple sources.
April 12th, 2005 at 5:23 am
@Rolly
Are you using Broadband? At high speed it is most often not an issue. The problem is very much visible at low speeds.
April 19th, 2005 at 12:01 pm
yes indeed it happened to me several times whilst downloading Roxio Creator 7.5 at 900+Mb a little anoying then found the extension Download Manager Tweak, Im using broadband but still a problem what good is pausing if resume never works!
April 22nd, 2005 at 10:30 pm
It can also happen with broadband as long as the connection is crappy, it happens all to me all the time.
These days I just start the download with Firefox and pass the link to GetRight which does the job properly.
Did you report a bug on this? I’ve been trying to find something on Bugzilla about this.
April 23rd, 2005 at 1:36 pm
@Daf
Check https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=291665
and
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=276254
Feel free add to it as you feel appropriate.
April 25th, 2005 at 9:43 am
@angsuman: Thanks
May 17th, 2005 at 2:49 am
Firefox on my WinXP machine has a broken downloader. Initiating download hangs a bit, opens the downloader, then just hangs the browser. Once in a while it will recover after many minutes. Mostly I use the task manager to kill the process which oddly also takes several minutes for it to actually shut down. Firefox on my Linux box downloads fine.
May 17th, 2005 at 2:29 pm
I also have this problem it seems to happen when there is a connection problem between me and the download host.
it seems some hosts will drop the http transfer but end the TCP session nicely FireFox wont recognize that the total bytes and bytes received are not the same and doesn’t reconnect to finish the transfer, the result is files of any size (I’ve had files as small as 200k not finish) are marked completed when they aren’t…
If the TCP session doesn’t finish nicely FireFox will behave correctly and won’t mark the download as complete (although FireFox doesn’t seem to want to resume unfinished downloads…)
This can be replicated by setting up a say a web server start downloading from the web server and pull out the network cable ff will just sit and wait…
but if in the same scenario you kill apache instead of pulling the network cable the TCP connection will finish nicely (well nicer
) and assume the download has finished..
I assume that this happens in real life when the web server you are downloading from for some reason kills your http session (e.g. TCP still finishes nicely)
This problem had been in every version of ff I have used from 0.9 - 1.04
Currently I am using wget when I want to download anything…
May 17th, 2005 at 3:02 pm
@SoloFlyer and others
Please update the bug description
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=291665
with your observations and also vote for it.
Your vote will ensure that it gets fixed.
@SoloFlyer I just copy the URL and paste it to DAP, a pain nevertheless.
June 2nd, 2005 at 12:23 am
The easiest answer might be to allow connecting
to some other download managers such as wget.
It looks as if java has something to do with the problem.
August 22nd, 2005 at 9:10 am
I have had the download problem as well.
If you select TOOLS and DOWNLOADS you can remove the list of downloaded items (and failed).
Then you can resume downloading without problems…
December 8th, 2005 at 6:09 am
Spent the better part of my night downloading two 800+ mb files and one of them is currently hung at 79%. I’ve paused it, restarted, and done pretty much everything short of cancelling the download and still nothing. This is the first and only issue I’ve ever had with Firefox and hopefully it will be the last. It would be a shame to have to get used to another browser so soon after doing so with Mozilla.
December 9th, 2005 at 9:41 am
I have observed the following behaviour very consistently with Firefox 1.0 and 1.5:
If I already have one donwload running, that download will stop when I start a second download. The dialog box that lets me specify the second download path takes a very long time to close, and then nothing happens for a minute or more. I see zero activity on my internet connection during this very long pause. After a mionute or so of no activity, both downloads will start to move.
If I try to open another instance of Firefox during the long pause, it just sits there and does nothing until the pause is over.
It looks to me like there’s some kind of deadlock in the download manager.
December 15th, 2005 at 2:58 pm
Had the same problem, removed all the previous downloads and things work fine now.
February 4th, 2006 at 12:32 am
i have had this problem for MONTHS and MONTHS. everytime i “save image as” firefox downloader opens and all firefox windows freeze. They can freeze for minutes at a time and if i am trying to download many images this can get very very frustrating. I have searched the internet for a solution for months to no avail, until today. Once I cleared the downloads the problem disappeared. thank you.
February 25th, 2006 at 7:45 pm
My download manager doesn’t look the same or work the same as it did before. I don’t have a clue what changed it. It used to be a large box with a graph showing the progress of the download and options I could choose. I could scroll through all my downloads to date. Now it’s a long small horizontal box that doesn’t show anything or let me do anything and it doesn’t show my previous downloads.
February 26th, 2006 at 3:34 am
Have you install any new extensions?
February 26th, 2006 at 4:09 pm
Yes I have installed extentions. Is there any particular one that might be the problem?
Thank you.
March 13th, 2006 at 6:58 am
how to get download resume after power failier
April 13th, 2006 at 5:16 pm
1.5.0.1’s download manager has the same problem –
I just lost 46MB of a 96MB download (on dial-up)
due to this. This is the worst deficiency of the
browser!
April 28th, 2006 at 9:30 pm
happens to me all da time.. aaarghhhhhh
June 22nd, 2006 at 12:25 am
Hi
This bug is still present in 1.5.0.4.
Downloading at home works fine, but at work the Internet connection is not quite as smooth and the Firefox progress bar just stops.
I have to copy the link to Safari, which maintains the download ‘connection’ just fine.
September 8th, 2006 at 9:47 pm
Still a constant problem on dial-up trying to down-load a 1 meg file attachment from gmail even with the latest program updates. I had been getting 99% cpu cycles (watching task manager) until I cleaned up the down-load manager. Thought I had the problem solved with that suggestion … but no, it still failed even with cpu cycles running low.
September 13th, 2006 at 3:07 am
in cases like this, I use Opera to download large files
IE for a stupid IE-only online banking site
and Firefox for all the rest
September 30th, 2006 at 8:33 pm
I try to download from Firefox and the box comes up like it is suppose to. I click save to disk…then it just says that the d/l is complete instantly without even d/l anything at all. Why’s this? does anyone else have this problem?
October 6th, 2006 at 3:19 pm
Mine doesn’t even came up. And i open it via Cltr J short cut, and the download list is empty even though it is actually still downloading the stuff i intended to download.
I tried to reinstall the firefox, it doens’t work. Nothing seem to work for me so far.
Does anyone know any trick to correct this?
October 24th, 2006 at 5:51 am
I’m using broadand and I normally have no trouble at least starting downloads of any size with firefox. The problem is the pause function. When I try to resume a paused download, the gauge instantly fills up as if it were complete.
October 28th, 2006 at 12:19 pm
Hi
Its sad to see download manager report “download complete” for cases where the internet link gets disconnected or line drops.
Ironically, same download manager which knows before hand that the download file is of 4.6mb does not realise that at 1.4mb download its corrupted.
it should actually pause and wait for user to ensure that link is up again and resume from there - i dont know if anyone has pointed it out earlier or this is taken care by some add-on.
guys/gals pls throw some light on any tips or tricks you would know to avoid this.
regards
limited
November 13th, 2006 at 5:55 am
I love firefox, but this stuff happens to me all the time! The download manager is horrible. How often have you gotten through 96% of a large file only for it to completely stop everything it is doing and hang there? Then you can’t finish the download, you have to restart it and have it happen again.
It’s not a slow connection for me. My connection is great. I actually have to use Internet Explorer to download files nowadays b/c of how crappy FF’s downloader is. And I HATE IE!!!!
December 24th, 2006 at 11:43 am
damn, FF fails me again
it just paused at 2 gigabytes downloading a 2.5 gig file from a http://ftp. resume does not work! Pressing cancel deletes the file entirely. I left my computer on all night to download this file and it was hard for me to sleep from all the fan noise, thanks a lot FF.
December 29th, 2006 at 10:57 pm
happens to me all the time.
the download manager marks the download as complete while only a portion of it is downloaded. and it happens to all versions of ff, nobody solved this bug i guess.
i’m a frequent downloader and this hell tells me that ff ain’t as good as you all think. now i really hate ff.
April 18th, 2007 at 12:02 pm
hi, i was downloading FREE avg antivirus via firefox downloader with a peace of mind that i could restart the download just in case. But I was wrong. After 85% of the total download i.e. 16MB via a 1kbps wireless internet connection and about 5 hours, I am left with no option except to go out of my home to a net cafe with a better internet speed. I thought firefox download manager will come to my help, but ALAS, i was utterly wrong in presuming. this is an open source software and such a critical error should have beeen resolved at least by the 50th release of firefox. Anyways, i continue using firefox as i got no other option. But in future, I will start to use getright as my favourite downloder software. sorry, but firefox should have this nice feature properly built or NOT included at best.
May 19th, 2007 at 8:00 am
FIREFOX stopped at 99% after I downloaded a 1 gig file that took 12 hours, I’ve been trying to get the file for two days…. it’s from a site where I can’t use a download mananager so I can’t resume if anything goes wrong. It was at fucking 967 out of 978 megs… You can imagine how pissed I was….
May 29th, 2007 at 4:14 am
i got a similar problem on my Windowns 2000 machine. Firefox’s download manager always worked very well for me, even on 64Kb/s ISDN. Even pausing downloads went incredibly smooth. I have installed Free Download Manager some time back but replaced it recently with FlashGet (but GetRight seems good to!). I started noticing that I have difficulty right-clicking and saving images, so I used FDM to do it. Then I realized the FF download manager is *broken*. Firefox still downloads files to my HD, the .part files are visible. But it’s completely silent. No poping up the download manager and no indication of progress. If I close FF it doesn’t warn me of losing the download. This *totally sucks*. With the advent of FF 2.0 I ran into another ugly problem: clicking the OK button on the bookmark dialog *wipes out the title of the bookmark*. The topmost “Bookmarks” folder doesnt like to be selected in the list either i have to open the list and select it. So all my bookmarks now have a trailing space. I love this browser - but it can really do with a sourcecode service.
June 6th, 2007 at 2:17 pm
I could of swore 1 gigabyte equals 1,024 megabytes.
July 9th, 2007 at 1:28 pm
I HAV GOT A VIRUS FOR FIREFOX, I M NOT ABLE TO OPEN IT FROM FEW DAYS…..I REALLY LUV THIS BROWSER BUT HELP ME OUT, WHENEVER I TRY TO OPEN IT PROMPTS”USE IE OR ELSE YOU DOPE”PLZ DO THE NEEDFULL….
July 31st, 2007 at 8:52 am
Talk about frustrating. Try downloading the same file 59 different times only to have the dumb thing freeze continuously what a waste of time. I would definitely appreciate a change to F.F. download manager as well or find a browser that is actually decent enough to have already corrected this problem . I am a cable user with WOW and I have their lowest paying package. Needless to say, even with cable this still presents a problem. SO HEY FIX THE PROBLEM ALREADY!!!!!! (Please??!)
September 13th, 2007 at 8:36 am
Download Getright,
it will allow you to resume your .part files caused by firefox.
Ben
October 29th, 2007 at 9:32 am
Yes I download GetRight and it resumed by broken Firefox download. You saved me downloading 1.5GB again. Thanks.
December 19th, 2007 at 3:22 am
Try deleting downloads.rdf in the profile folder.
January 16th, 2008 at 12:27 pm
THANK YOU
Went into C:\Documents and Settings\Bill\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\stkdv2o6.default and deleted DOWNLOADS.RDF and I have my DL manager back.
Hope that path helps the next person with this problem.
March 25th, 2008 at 8:46 pm
thx everyyone.
September 20th, 2008 at 12:46 pm
Thank You guys… you were too helpful…
October 22nd, 2009 at 7:54 pm
I was having the same problem downloading an Oracle file using Firefox - it would appear to go to a limbo state after downloading 99%. I tried switching to IE, which Oracle recommended - it was one of their files I am downloading. The same exact thing is happening with IE. In the meantime, I just paid $75 for an e-book I cant open without this Secured PDF opener file.