How about giving your downloads a little boost? Multithreaded Download Manager (MDM) is an extension for the Firefox browser that allows you to speed up downloads thanks to the multithreading or what is also known as "multiple threads".
Most download managers usually need a lot of permissions, and in the case of the MDM extension, things don't change much. However, we are facing an open source tool so we can consult its entire code from its Github page, which gives us some assurance that things are being done well.
How can we speed up downloads by using multithreading?
That said, the great feature of this extension for Firefox is that it allows split each download into different threads that work in parallel, each of these threads downloading a part of the file. In this way we get the download to be done at a higher speed. Sounds interesting right?
Of course this only works if the server and our network accept this type of multi-threaded downloads, something that does not always happen on the Internet. In any case, the MDM extension is configured by default to divide each download into 4 threads, although this is a variable that we can modify from the tool's configuration settings.
Firefox, for example, only allows a maximum of 6 threads, although this value can be altered by changing the variables ofnetwork.http.max-persistent-connections-per-server and network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-proxy accordingly.
Once we have the extension installed we will see how a new icon appears next to the navigation bar. If we click on it we will see a list with the downloads in progress, as well as the typical information with the speed, percentage completed, pause-resume and other data of interest.
Other interesting detail is that the MDM extension is capable of detecting any download automatically, although we can also add one or more URLs by hand or detect a new download copying url to clipboard.
If we add a URL it will show us all available downloads and media files on said web page. The truth is that it cannot be simpler and more practical. In addition to this, the application also allows us to do verification sums (checksum) to ensure that the download is successful, as well as to establish the minimum size of each block or the number of retries in case of failure or cut.
We are facing a very complete download manager, with a good number of options to automate our downloads, customize the interface, eliminate failed downloads, etc. In short, a highly recommended extension for Mozilla web browser users.
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