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Ask HN: Are download accelerators still a thing?
Hello,
I was wondering if people still use download accelerators. Reason for asking is that I am working from China and 99% of the time I use a VPN. The connection is flaky most of the time and when downloading large files, a single hiccup (TCP reset) or when changing VPN locations is enough to break the download. I remember back in the days of dialup (I feel like this some days) you could pause a download and resume it effortlessly using a third party accelerators. A quick google search shows many dodgy chrome plugins or programs.. Any recommendations for Linux, Mac?
Thanks!
- PaulHoule 10y agoTry axel which is a drop-in replacement for curl but has the features of a download accelerator.
- penetrarthur 10y agoFree download manager has worked flawlessly for years for me. Not sure how it works on Mac tho, but worth giving a try. http://www.freedownloadmanager.org/download.htm http://www.freedownloadmanager.org/download.htm
- drakenot 10y agoI would look into using aria2, a CLI download utility. It has a '-c' or '-continue' flag to resume a partial download.
- aruggirello 10y agoOn Firefox, I'm using DownThemAll. It has lots of features, including bandwidth throttling, downloading from multiple mirrors at once, checksumming, pausing etc.
- balac 10y agoI've also been using DownThemAll for a very long time, it does an excellent job and is one of the main reasons I still have Firefox installed at all.
- matbram 10y agoNot a gui program, but for Linux, I always love just using wget. Works great, and very powerful.