[HN Gopher] DownThemAll (2019)
___________________________________________________________________
DownThemAll (2019)
Author : Tomte
Score : 180 points
Date : 2021-11-03 11:36 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (addons.mozilla.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (addons.mozilla.org)
| pcf wrote:
| Personally I still use JDownloader for everything, also to
| download source files for video streams.
| havkd wrote:
| I used this a lot back in the day. I remember that I would always
| read the name as "download the mall".
| vishnu2pc wrote:
| Go-to download manager back when I still had dialup and 128k
| later. Made downloading stuff somewhat tolerable
| [deleted]
| WalterGR wrote:
| "Last updated
|
| 2 years ago (Nov 26, 2019)"
| forgotmypw17 wrote:
| It's nice to see a finished piece of software.
| pkrumins wrote:
| You mean abandoned software. Software is never finished.
| Sporktacular wrote:
| When it does exactly what it's scoped to do, it's finished.
| If the system around it makes it incompatible, then the
| scope has changed.
| tn123 wrote:
| I (Nils) am the maintainer, and I would more characterize
| it as slumbering, not entirely abandoned or dead. I keep
| meaning to fix bugs and make new releases, but as we all
| know the last two years have been a bit crazy ;) I know,
| that's a lame excuse, and I already planned to do better
| now that things in the world finally seem to settle down a
| little, even before seeing this little reminder pop up on
| HN.
| schwartzworld wrote:
| For a downloader, that might be a bit of a bad sign. As pages
| like youtube change, downloader software code needs to change
| to keep up. See youtube-dl as an example.
| caddybox wrote:
| This software only provides a means to batch and automate
| things you'd have to manually download through "save link
| as". It's not chasing a moving target like youtube-dl.
|
| It's quite useful where you have 50 PDFs on a school page
| and you'd like to download them all without manually
| clicking save link as on each one of them. I have fond
| memories of DTA from my bachelor studies.
| amelius wrote:
| Meanwhile, Youtube-DL is continuously being updated, because
| they have to work around obstacles raised by Google to
| prevent automatic downloading.
| slightwinder wrote:
| Actually, youtube-dl is dead at the moment for reasons of
| private life of the maintainer. So people now use a fork
| called yt-dlp. Which is ironic, because most people moved
| when google started to use a new harsh speed-limitation.
| chuckee wrote:
| > to prevent automatic downloading
|
| To prevent _all_ downloading, not just automatic. When they
| remove a video, they don 't want you to have an archived
| copy to prove the content ever existed, or to watch it
| without their permission.
| whoopdedo wrote:
| I think it's more that DTA was a victim of FF Quantum.
|
| > We are therefore limited to the tools the WebExtensions
| model provides to us, which sadly makes it impossible to
| provide some of the advanced features of DownThemAll! Version
| 3.
|
| I didn't even know they attempted a WebExtension rewrite and
| am not surprised that it wasn't able to do the things that
| made the old DTA worth using.
| qwerty2021 wrote:
| that's exactly the case. the rewrite took years, and it is
| only somewhat functional, but I don't blame the dev. pre-
| quantum version was a finished product, and then suddenly
| it had to be written from scratch again. I'm surprised he
| had bothered to do that at all, personally I'd never
| contribute anything to firefox again after that fucking
| stunt.
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| I was responsible for extension author outreach at
| Mozilla at the time. The anger was terrible. And
| justified.
| eitland wrote:
| You might have knowledge and connections:
|
| Do you see any hope for a fork of modern Firefox that
| start with just the tiniest stuff, maybe adding back a
| simple tab strip api to let Tree Style Tabs work properly
| again, that kind of stuff, then go on to put Mozilla out
| of business as soon as the economy allows it?
|
| I'm only halfway joking here, and only about putting
| Mozilla out of business.
| forgotmypw17 wrote:
| Either of these may fit the bill:
|
| PaleMoon
|
| Waterfox Classic
| eitland wrote:
| Both are forks of older versions of Firefox, aren't they.
| This makes it harder to keep them patched I think.
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| Yeah, I don't see how the maintainers can patch security
| vulns or add support for newer web features (e.g. CSS
| variables) when the upstream fork is no longer
| maintained. They would have to write the fixes
| themselves, which just does not scale for a project that
| has 1 or 2 developers working on it part-time.
| forgotmypw17 wrote:
| I think we're at a point where there are enough sites out
| there that we can avoid a good portion of them (i.e. ones
| written without progressive enhancement in mind) and
| still be happy.
|
| For example, I am quite happy with visiting only sites
| which do not require JavaScript, do not use cookie
| banners, paywalls, and registration prompts.
|
| For my purposes of browsing Teddit, HN, and my own
| websites, there are more than 20 beautiful, usable,
| friendly browsers I can think of just off the top of my
| head.
|
| For everything else, I just close the tab and move on.
| Past experience leads me to believe I'm not missing much,
| because sites which break these requirements usually have
| crap content too.
|
| If I really need something, I can open Chromium (with UO
| and Vimium) for that particular site and then close it
| afterwards.
| dblohm7 wrote:
| > Do you see any hope for a fork of modern Firefox that
| start with just the tiniest stuff, maybe adding back a
| simple tab strip api
|
| Why bother with the overhead of a fork? Perhaps a team of
| volunteers could put together a good enough proposal to
| be accepted by the WebExtensions team.
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| No. Who would use it? The few hundred thousand who want
| Tree Style Tabs?
|
| Separately, keeping a browser up-to-date with new
| standards and security fixes is a huge undertaking. You
| would need a lot of engineers invested in such a project.
|
| By the way, Nils from DownThemAll is a great guy. He
| wrote a scathing blog post at the time Mozilla announced
| dropping support for "legacy" extensions. Wish I could
| find it.
| mamurphy wrote:
| Nils's blog post[0] that I found linked here[1] from
| here[2]. I found that last link from the google search
| (Nils Maier blog post Firefox extension).
|
| [0]https://www.downthemall.org/the-likely-end-of-
| downthemall/
|
| [1]https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2015/08/21/the-future-
| of-dev...
|
| [2]https://www.zdnet.com/article/mozilla-changes-firefox-
| apis-d...
| eitland wrote:
| > No. Who would use it? The few hundred thousand who want
| Tree Style Tabs?
|
| No, I want the few tens of million ex-Firefox users that
| have left during the last decade because of being annoyed
| or because of the pragmatic reason that Firefox doesn't
| offer any experienced direct advantage anymore while
| Chrome is pushed heavily and has a experienced direct
| advantage: that Google web properties are optimized, not
| sabotaged on it.
|
| > Separately, keeping a browser up-to-date with new
| standards and security fixes is a huge undertaking. You
| would need a lot of engineers invested in such a project.
|
| Here I should have been more precise: I mean to start
| with a soft fork. Start by building from ordinary Firefox
| with just small patches to fix the worst offenders like
| the tab strip API and restoring the UI.
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| > No, I want the few tens of million ex-Firefox users
| that have left during the last decade because of being
| annoyed or because of the pragmatic reason that Firefox
| doesn't offer any experienced direct advantage anymore
| while Chrome is pushed heavily and has a experienced
| direct advantage: that Google web properties are
| optimized, not sabotaged on it.
|
| Me too.
|
| Leadership at Mozilla is interested more in social
| justice, diversity, and equity issues than engineering
| issues. Don't look for this to come from today's Mozilla.
|
| There is lately a push for privacy issues at Mozilla,
| which is nice to see.
| forgotmypw17 wrote:
| I just want to point out that you casually dismissed "a
| few hundred thousand" users whose lives were impacted as
| a non-issue.
|
| This is exactly the type of attitude which gives software
| dev such a bad rap.
|
| I personally support every single user of my products and
| never force a new version on them.
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| > casually dismissed "a few hundred thousand" users whose
| lives were impacted as a non-issue.
|
| I did not intend that. My intention is this: "the cost of
| maintaining a browser with up-to-date standards and
| security is enormous". A few hundred thousand users who
| are unlikely to pay anything for such a browser is just
| financially not viable.
| slightwinder wrote:
| I'm curious how far they even tried to replicate the old
| feature-set. Firefox out-of-box has awful limitations, but
| they offer also ways to circumvent them with integration of
| external helpers. There are several WebExtension who offer
| additional features with helper-scripts. A downloadmanager
| seems to be the perfect example for walking this road.
| theandrewbailey wrote:
| A quick read in the reviews suggests that there are still
| bugs to be fixed.
| SavantIdiot wrote:
| I'll be the brave one to say it: download entire image-based porn
| sites in one click. Porn has gone almost entirely video now, so
| the days of galleries have largely disappeared. There were auto-
| indexers as well that would increment URLs based on patterns.
| ivanmontillam wrote:
| Or download entire 4chan threads. At least the images.
| beardyw wrote:
| IIRC when I couldn't use DTA anymore I used to take a local copy
| of a page, change 'a' tags to 'img' tags and 'href' to 'src', and
| then save web page complete. Got me a folder with the downloads
| in it. Rough and ready!
| rocky1138 wrote:
| I used this years ago. Worked great.
| unixhero wrote:
| A fantastic download manager.
| thrower123 wrote:
| There was nothing more frustrating than trying to download a file
| of a few megabytes back in the long, long ago, and then something
| would glitch out at 90%, and you'd have to start over again on
| your dial-up connection. Download managers that could resume an
| interrupted download were a game changer.
|
| Modern browsers still suck at dealing with downloads if you have
| a flaky connection that gets interrupted, but we mostly don't
| care because you can slurp gigabytes in seconds on fiber
| connections, so it takes a really, really jacked up VPN
| connection or intrusive proxy to make an impact.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Don't know where you live but gigabit fiber is nowhere to be
| found in these parts.
|
| The game changer(s) were when browsers implemented resumable
| downloads, and most giant file distribution moved to torrents.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| Woah, this gives me flashbacks. I remember using this to download
| files from shady websites on the school computers in the Firefox
| 3.5 era.
|
| These days, connections have become so fast that I don't really
| use a download manager anymore. The last place I download large
| files from through the browser is Mega, and its encryption is
| inherently incompatible with this addon.
| rzzzt wrote:
| I took GetBot for a spin recently from my downloaded apps
| archive, but unfortunately it doesn't handle files above 2GB
| very well -- the remaining bytes/time counter goes nuts. Too
| bad, I liked its clipboard support where you could also paste a
| list of URLs it needs to go through.
| notjulianjaynes wrote:
| I still use it in cases when a page links to a bunch of
| individual media files I want to download quickly and without
| making a complete mess of my downloads folder. Rare nowadays,
| but find it a lot on academic type websites.
|
| Perfect example: https://www.ubu.com/sound/antin.html
| DavidPeiffer wrote:
| I downloaded a good chunk of Gameboy and N64 ROM's from
| https://www.theoldcomputer.com/ around 2010. It was a very
| effective add-on.
| Isthatablackgsd wrote:
| Download Managers is still being used to this day. I have to
| use a download manager to download a 250MB file that capped the
| speed at 50KBps... And this is coming from a well-known but
| shitty printer company. So it took ages to down that and often
| it would failed. JDownloader2 took care of that since it can do
| multiple connection to do a quicker download.
|
| If you need a download manager for MEGA, check into
| JDownloader2. They are compatible with MEGA en/decryption. And
| developers is very active.
| Qub3d wrote:
| It might be more of an annoyance for the basic "I got a link
| to a file and I just want to download it" use case, but I use
| rclone's mega backend: https://rclone.org/mega/
| vvilliamperez wrote:
| Back in the days of dial-up
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Download_Accelerator_Plus used to
| help a bunch too.
| aeonflux wrote:
| What is the point of this link? Also - why does it links to the
| german version of addons page?
| rakamotog wrote:
| https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/downthemall/
| Here is english link
| ZoomZoomZoom wrote:
| It's a nice extension, and there was a time when I used it
| frequently, but the thing is - it should be completely
| unnecessary.
|
| I already have software which downloads anything I want fast, the
| issue is, I can't simply connect it to Firefox anymore. Same goes
| to using external players to view media (I need more nuanced
| control over rate and pitch of the playback).
|
| I understand it's done in the name of security, but I refuse to
| accept there's no practical way to allow user to launch software
| on his own machine from the browser without some auxiliary
| intermediate program which some older extensions suggested as a
| way to continue working.
|
| Sorry for the rant.
| FinalBriefing wrote:
| If the app supports deep linking, then a browser can open up
| content in an app. See most video conference links.
|
| I imagine a browser extensions that adds deep-links for certain
| media to be opened in external software is possible. Just needs
| coordination with the app...
| badsectoracula wrote:
| You can use Firefox Developer Edition and make your own addon.
| It isn't exactly straightforward, especially the "communicate
| with external software" part (e.g. in Windows you need to put
| some entry in the registry to let Firefox know what program you
| need to communicate with) and communication has to be via JSON
| which in practice means you need to write some sort of proxy
| app.
|
| But it is possible. I have made my own little addon that calls
| yt-dlp (previously youtube-dl) with the current URL to save
| videos from YouTube and other supported places (e.g. Reddit)
| with a single click. The addon communicates with a Python
| program to send it the current page's URL which in turn just
| changes to a predefined directory (where downloaded videos are
| stored) and calls yt-dlp with that URL.
|
| I was a bit hesitant at first to bother with all that but
| eventually i decided that it is "my browser" so i should be
| able to do whatever i want with it and certainly adding a
| button to call a program with the current URL should be more
| than possible.
|
| The downside is that Developer Edition updates way more often
| than regular Firefox which in theory might break stuff but
| personally i never had an issue with it.
| Berazu wrote:
| May we know what software you use?
| wesapien wrote:
| Are you talking about jdownloader2?
| bertman wrote:
| Maybe have a look at these:
|
| https://addons.mozilla.org/de/firefox/addon/aria2-integratio...
|
| https://addons.mozilla.org/de/firefox/addon/ff2mpv/
| ZoomZoomZoom wrote:
| Thanks. The first one seems to rely on the fact that aria2
| can be remotely controlled. This is good, and in case of
| aria2 may be even the preferred way of using the combo, but
| it's not the substitute for the basic launching of one
| program from the other with some data passing.
|
| The second one needs the "native client" which I mentioned
| above. It uses effing python to pass the link from the
| browser to the player! It's a workaround and an ugly
| complication. The more I use technology the more I come to
| despise those levels of software strata solving the problem
| the lower layers introduced for disputable reasons.
| ubercow13 wrote:
| This one achieves the same thing without a native client:
| https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/play-with/
| brunoqc wrote:
| Thanks.
|
| The aria2 one didn't have an update since 2019 though.
| benbristow wrote:
| I've been using this for decades. Originally I pirated it when I
| was younger but recently bought a lifetime licence (very
| affordable!) and it's genuinely a great tool if you're on
| Windows. Does help download speeds too if you're on an ISP where
| single thread speeds can be a bit rubbish (Virgin Media in the
| UK). Gets updated often too.
|
| https://www.internetdownloadmanager.com/
| generationP wrote:
| Wow, I hadn't expected this to come back given the wind and
| weather of the present internet! I routinely used this back in
| the early 2010s, but then I switched to wget (and Chrome) as
| Firefox destroyed the plugin by changing its addon language.
| chheplo wrote:
| We are still talking about Download Manager in 2021. Something
| went wrong somewhere.
| Isthatablackgsd wrote:
| Yes, they are still useful. Download managers can download
| specific range of files that we are only interested in which it
| can be filtered out. Like youtube-dl and gallery-dl, they are a
| specialized download manager and did amazing job with it.
|
| If I find a gallery of images that I like to keep. I can use
| gallery-dl for that and use _gallery-dl
| "instagram.com/boburnham"_ in the command line and it will
| crawl and download the images within the gallery.
| rcMgD2BwE72F wrote:
| What's wrong with download managers?
|
| Should I only use the one provided by my Web browser? Should I
| not download the content that I want to access locally or share
| between devices without being obliged to stream/download it
| again from a server?
| vdfs wrote:
| There also some websites that throttle your download speed,
| you can fix that by using parallel download of same file.
| cptaj wrote:
| Some countries and ISPs do this as well. Lots of uses for
| download managers
| klntsky wrote:
| Batch downloads are still useful.
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| It's not just a download manager!
|
| Imagine a page with 50 links, that you each have to download by
| hand? Nope! Just DTA and a filter to choose what you want.
|
| Photo gallery? Same!
|
| Open a bunch of stuff in different tabs, and want to download
| the same thing (eg. .zip file) from each open tab... DTA all
| tabs, and *.zip filter.
|
| Regex filter? Sure!
|
| The basic download manager part is just an extra feature, that
| you usually don't need.
| layer8 wrote:
| Still, one could reasonably expect that applying a functional
| pipeline to web page contents (extract and filter links, pipe
| them into the download queue) should be regular web browser
| functionality.
| steffoz wrote:
| Wow. Didn't expect this :) I was the author of this tiny
| extension back in the days (extension #201, I still remember it)
| together with a friend who recently passed away, Federico Parodi.
|
| We hacked the first version when we still didn't know much about
| JS, but it immediately exploded (500k daily users). Donations
| were super helpful at that time, being 22 years old with a
| newborn.
|
| After a couple of years (iirc) Nils Maier joined the team and
| helped us a lot. Years later he managed to transition the
| codebase to the new web extension tooling that was introduced by
| Firefox a few years ago.
|
| This little extension really shaped my professional career. The
| realization that something I made could have such an impact is
| what gave me the drive to keep creating small indie products,
| which I'm still doing nowadays with http://www.datocms.com
|
| Thanks for making my day! :)
| tn123 wrote:
| Hi Stefano, Nils here, long time no see.
|
| Yeah, it was 2006 when I joined you and Federico, if I remember
| correctly, while you and Federico started DownThemAll! in 2004.
| #201 is correct :D
|
| 2006 was really a long time ago...
|
| DownThemAll! went through a lot of revisions since that time,
| including the work it took to make it restartless, then make it
| compatible with "electrolysis" and so on. And in the meantime
| ensure it didn't break with every Firefox release. But at the
| core the functionality kept the same. People contacting me with
| questions could be quite overwhelming - and I am sorry if some
| of you HN'ers mailed me and I didn't answer - but it was very
| enjoyable to see what different kinds of people were using our
| creation and get in touch with all kinds of folks that way,
| from students downloading lecture videos to movie editors
| downloading the "dailies", and everything in between.
|
| I am still not happy mozilla decided they had to break all
| extensions, and I had to do a full rewrite as a WebExtension,
| and thus abandon a lot of features that simply are not possible
| anymore with that new API, while at the same time reinvent the
| wheel for the UI (now being forced to use vanilla HTML, which
| can be quite hard to get performant enough when people queue a
| couple of tens of thousands downloads at once). But the very
| core of functionality, namely selecting and queuing up a lot of
| links quickly, is still there, so I hope some people still find
| this new DownThemAll! WebExtension useful.
|
| Lastly, while the last release was indeed 2 years ago, I keep
| meaning to fix some bugs and make a new release. I was already
| planning to set aside a lot of time this month for that, even
| before seeing DTA pop up on HN again. I guess this HN post can
| only motivate me more :D
|
| Federico's death was incredibly sad. We only met once in
| person, but he was such a nice and humble guy, not just in real
| life but online too. I miss him too, may he rest in peace.
| wackget wrote:
| As a life-long Firefox user who has been increasingly angry
| with Mozilla's direction for the browser for the past ten
| years, I honestly don't know how developers like you could
| put up with it.
|
| Trashing an entire swathe of extensions - hundreds of
| thousands of man-hours of work - and then making breaking
| changes in nearly every subsequent version after that... it's
| precisely why I've never even considered making a browser
| extension. It would be pure hell.
| smoldesu wrote:
| If you think that's bad, try developing native apps.
| melony wrote:
| Specifically those for Apple's ecosystem.
| BeetleB wrote:
| Another thanks. I used this addon heavily.
| errantspark wrote:
| Thank you so much for this! It was truly a lifesaver for a
| young pirate. My dad blocked torrents on our home network and I
| hadn't yet learned enough linux to crack our neighbors WEP
| DownThemAll was key to pirating games and movies off 20+ part
| rapidshares. <3
| jonathanlb wrote:
| Thank you for helping to make the Internet a delightful
| experience.
| billwashere wrote:
| Thank you! You made my dial-up connection usable.
| _fat_santa wrote:
| Thanks for making this. I remember downloading ROM's back in
| high-school. This made downloading way way easier.
| approxim8ion wrote:
| Many thanks to you. This extension was a darling of mine for a
| really long time, and brought me much joy.
| desi_ninja wrote:
| as a ardent user of the plugin back in 2008-09, I want to say
| thank you all who made it possible
| CodeMage wrote:
| Thanks for making DTA! I used it a lot back in the day.
| anoncow wrote:
| Thank you for making the internet that much more usable. I
| would install Firefox and DTA on all machines I configured back
| in the day.
| XiS wrote:
| Thank you very much for creating this extension, I used it a
| lot back in the day!
| Saint_Genet wrote:
| I pirated so many low-res seasons of tv shows with this tool.
| calacatta wrote:
| +1. DTA + Usenet = happy days
| Tijdreiziger wrote:
| Thanks for making this! I too used it back in the day. I
| thought the project died with WebExtensions, good to hear it's
| back.
| tn123 wrote:
| I (Nils) was the maintainer of it for many years at the point
| already, and I was genuinely considering to let it die for
| quite a while. I was furious at what mozilla did to the loyal
| and active extension community and especially on how they did
| it - essentially by decree without community interaction at
| all. I was part of the mozilla volunteer army, not just with
| DownThemAll! and a few other more minor extensions, but I
| also had been on the team reviewing add-on submissions - I
| think I reviewed something like 2000-2500 individual
| submissions including updates in the end - and contributed a
| few minor bits to Firefox itself. The carelessness of how
| mozilla approached this large chunk of their community, after
| declaring their "1 million mozillians" goal not too long
| before, was mindblowing to me.
|
| I eventually decided not to let it die... DownThemAll! had
| been a big part of my life, and while I recognized that I had
| to dumb down the feature set, I saw a way to at least make
| the core stuff work, maybe. I am glad I tried it even though
| it required a considerable amount of time to fully rewrite
| this thing.
|
| The net result of mozilla's move was that they killed a large
| number of useful extensions entirely, while the survivors
| then usually became available for Chrome as well thanks to
| the mostly shared API - DownThemAll! is available for Chrome
| as well right now - giving users even less incentive to stay
| with Firefox. Oh well.
| anoncow wrote:
| Mozilla's self-sabotaging actions made it seem to me that
| it was Google's money talking. That it was a Google funded
| plan to kill everything that made Firefox great. Really
| enjoyed Firefox's heydays and DTA. You guys were a part of
| saving the internet from IE.
| Xamayon wrote:
| I felt the same way about how they killed off the old
| extensions. It took a lot of work to rewrite my (much
| smaller) Image Search Options extension, and lots of once
| key features had to be removed... I tried to work with
| Mozilla to get a couple minor changes made to enable some
| of the missing features, but that went nowhere fast. The
| new extension works, but it's a shadow of its former self.
| Although I did also port it to chrome (why not, right?) I
| wound up not publishing the full version. For better or
| worse, I still feel Firefox is the best browser. Its a
| small measure, but if my extension has helped keep even a
| few users, I count that as a win.
| m4rtink wrote:
| The mobile Firefox situation is even bigger mess - there
| used to be a mozikka maintained Firefox build based on
| older Firefox cidebase that supported quite many Firefox
| extensions. Then last summer Mozilla decided to update
| the codebase and rewrite the GUI on Android. End result ?
| A hand picked list of essential extensions (Ublock Origin
| basically and little else) that are available that hardly
| gets ever extended.
|
| You _can_ add arbitrary exebsions to the android Firefix
| nightly build, but it involves a lot of unnecessary
| steps, such as custom extension list creation, id passing
| and other bullshit.
|
| End result is that the best bet for using extensions on
| Android is actually Chrome extensions & _the Yandex
| browser_ of all things, which will just install anything
| from the Chrome web store (and it often will even work).
|
| Oh how low we have gone...
| tn123 wrote:
| >I tried to work with Mozilla to get a couple minor
| changes made to enable some of the missing features, but
| that went nowhere fast.
|
| Yeah, unless you actually write the code, there is no
| way. And writing code for the mozilla code base can be
| quite intimidating with their mix of C++ and js and XPCOM
| and not-XPCOM and webidl, etc. I once submitted a patch
| (unrelated to my extensions) that bounced from the who-
| is-who of mozilla rockstar devs at the time, and nobody
| wanted to really even look it because it was changing
| something so deep within the XPCOM-Javascript bridge and
| nobody really remembered how it even worked. I finally
| got my r+ from some brave soul who just said "I don't
| really know the code it touches either, but somebody has
| to do the review".
|
| Even if you do the work, it can be an uphill battle to
| get code in, especially if you're trying to add new
| features and not just fix existing bugs.
|
| I spoke to people within mozilla back in the day - I was
| part of the community after all and knew a lot of folks -
| and they weren't exactly happy, but weren't in a position
| to make things better, either.
|
| DownThemAll! was big enough that they eventually
| "officially" reached out and ask me what I need, and then
| essentially said they couldn't really do any of it,
| "sorry" and they know "that sucks" (refreshingly honest,
| at least, but I wasn't talking to upper management but a
| developer-turned-developer-relations). The person who
| contacted me, one could tell, was given a mission to
| appease developers by showing mozilla cared, but wasn't
| actually provided any resources to really help or support
| people. All that person could do was to apologize and
| suggest to read the docs and read the docs on how to
| propose and implement new APIs - but at the time I had
| already proposed some new APIs that in my opinion would
| not just have benefited DownThemAll! but all kinds of
| add-ons dealing with downloads, and was struck down as
| "not generally useful to a lot of add-ons, sorry, we do
| not want to maintain such an API" already.
|
| What I said almost 5 years ago still is true in that
| regard: they tried to a certain degree to accommodate
| some of the really popular add-ons, and with some success
| too, and the smaller add-ons were left in the dust. Not
| because of ill-will of mozilla, but simply because they
| lacked the resources to do anything more.
| tandr wrote:
| Thank you for such a time-saving extension! I got much more
| time to read while it was doing what it was doing, instead of
| endless "right-click, save as" sequences.
| pionar wrote:
| Thanks so much for making this. I used this back in the day to
| download (legally) mp3s from friends' pages.
| rainboiboi wrote:
| Whoa, never thought I can put in a word of thanks directly to
| the creator of DownThemAll. Thank you for your contribution -
| this made my teenager days much more fulfilling. =)
| srvmshr wrote:
| This was seriously the only Download manager (for bulk downloads)
| that I used for a long time.
| siva_ wrote:
| I just wish we could add a delay in-between downloads so as not
| to hammer servers or run into 429 errors. An older version had
| this capability.
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