If you’ve ever had to deal with an errant internet connection while downloading a set of hefty multimedia files, you’ll know how irritating that can be. The internet keeps going down and the browser keeps trying to start your download, all over again. Even if the connection is holding up well, the Internet and TCP/IP in particular, was never designed for the huge files that we transfer these days, and sooner or later you are bound the drop the connection or have your download timed out.

Back when most people used dial up to connect to the Internet, download managers were pretty much the only way to download files off the Internet. Well, the download managers still exists and they’ve gotten a lot more smarter. DownThemAll is one such download manager.

DownThemAll is a download manager as well as a download accelerator built as a firefox add-on. A download accelerator is a program that breaks up the requested file into several chunks and downloads them all at the same time, thereby accelerating the download, and then joins all the pieces together at the end.

DownThemAll can be downloaded and installed from the mozilla add-on repository. Once downloaded, restart firefox and the very first time after the install you’ll be asked to setup the default directory for downloads. This is something you can select and change later also. All the settings and preferences for DownThemAll are available from the Tools menu of firefox.

Since, this is a firefox add-on we’re talking about, I have to tell you about the awesome integration that DownThemAll has with firefox. I’m sure all of you have seen the window that firefox pops up when you click on a link to download a file. dTa integrates with this window and all you have to do to have dTa download the file is select the option that says so.

By default, DownThemAll downloads a file in 5 segments, which means that the file will be divided in 5 pieces and all 5 will be downloaded simultaneously. You can, of course, change this default as well as a lot of other settings from the Preferences dialogue (Tools->DownThemAll Tools->Preferences).

DownThemAll is definitely my favorite download manager, not only for it’s awesome capabilities but for the fact that it has the best integration with firefox, which is what I use as my browser.

Do you guys use any download manager ? Which is your favorite download manager ? Let me know in the comments.

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