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Firefox downloads

Paul C. Anagnostopoulos

Nap, interrupted.
Paul C. Anagnostopoulos
Joined
Aug 3, 2001
Messages
19,141
When I start a download in Firefox, it takes at least 10 seconds before the download actually begins. There is also a delay when the download ends. Does anyone else see this behavior?

~~ Paul
 
The latter issue I see in IE, oddly, because of the way it downloads to cache, then copies to destination. Firefox doesn't do this, but rather writes the file to destination directly. You don't say what OS you're using. I don't get this problem using FF 1.5.0.1 on WinXP.

Cheers,
Rat.
 
I have the same deal. Perhaps it's another component on my system, but it doesn't happen with IE or Opera.

Do you have the download manager dialog enabled?

~~ Paul
 
The download manager appears as long as the download is long enough to make it worthwhile. I have it set to disappear upon completion. Do make sure the list of downloads in the dl manager isn't full of completed downloads; it sometimes slows things down if that's very full.

Cheers,
Rat.
 
Paul C. Anagnostopoulos said:
When I start a download in Firefox, it takes at least 10 seconds before the download actually begins. There is also a delay when the download ends. Does anyone else see this behavior?

~~ Paul
Click to expand...

all downloads? for the first issue I've seen it when a site tries to use a clever redirect to start the download.
 
FYI, you can set the Download History to clear automatically in Options -> Privacy -> Download History.
 
Aha! I set it to clear the download list when Firefox exits. I still cannot imagine why a long download list makes a wit of difference. What's it doing, opening all the files?

~~ Paul
 
That's wierd. I've always had it set to clear and exit, so I never noticed any delay. Hard to see why it would affect anything. But you're right. It does.
 
The only thing that springs to mind is that each file has the relevant icon by it. So I guess it's having to find the associated icon for each file, within the file itself if it's an executable. If this is what's causing it, antivirus would slow it down, as each file would have to be virus-scanned first.

Cheers,
Rat.
 
That's a point. Windows itself certainly does cache icons, in the dreaded can't-be-defragged ShellIconCache.db file. Can other apps access this, or is it only accessible to Explorer itself? Anyway, I would think that fixing Mozilla to cache them would make sense if not.

Cheers,
Rat.
 
You should have a look at the "flashgot" extension for Firefox. Nothing to do with Flash, everything to do with downloading :)

1. Get a free downloader (there is a list on the flashgot home-page), I use d4x (on Linux), but I think you can use stuff like Getright and there is a free manager under Window$ but I can't recall the name now.
2. Get the extension.

Then you can direct downloads to the manager rather than have Firefox handle them. This way if FF crashes or you need to restart your box for some reason, the manager can continue the downloads afterwards.

It's also great for grabbing ALL the links on a single page in one go - like a gallery of images or many pdf files for example.

It's well worth it.
 
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