FlashGot: The Meta Download Manager

FlashGot is a download manager management extension for Mozilla's various products (Firefox, Thunderbird, SeaMonkey). This is the meaning of the "meta" in the title - it manages various other download managers that you may have installed on your computer. Therefore it requires a download manager (such as JDownloader) to be already installed. But why would you even use a download manager, much less a manager for managers?

Presumably, this isn't a hard sell. If you've ever had a download unexpectedly stop and found yourself wishing you could just resume it from where it was instead of re-downloading the entire thing, what you need is a download manager. A piece of software to manage your downloads in various ways, such as starting, stopping, and resuming them at will, adjusting various network settings (max speed, number of connections...), breaking them up in batches, scheduling them, etc. The possibilities vary from very basic to fully programmable, and this topic could be an article of its own.

But what is the value of an extension that manages the managers? Especially if your chosen downloader already comes with a plugin for Firefox (let us assume you don't care about Thunderbird integration for the moment)? Well, even if it does, it probably isn't all that great - how does it integrate with Firefox? Does it offer all the options it normally has? Does it break with each new version? If Mozilla decides to revamp their plugin architecture, how long will you have to wait for an update?

FlashGot erases all those worries. It also enables the integration of those download managers that don't have plugins, which is a sizable category. Out-of-the-box, it supports over 40 applications and this number increases often - the latest version (1.5.5.98 at the time of this writing) added support for three new ones and improved it for two other applications, in addition to a myriad of other enhancements.

FlashGot is written by the same people who brought you NoScript, and if you know NoScript, you know it updates very often, as it's practically forced to due to the ever-changing nature of the web and Mozilla's love of backwards incompatibility. It also means there's a perhaps uncommon focus on security, which is certainly a plus.

I've only covered one feature of FlashGot - but there are others. One I find very convenient is downloading various media files - unless the page authors went to some trouble to make it difficult, FlashGot will detect all such files on a page and allow you to download any or all of them. This is really a consequence of allowing you to filter and download all the links on a web page, which means you can choose whatever subset of files you need by extension or by name.

So, want to download a YouTube video? No problem, and you get to choose in which quality you want it, provided it is offered in more than one. PDF notes from your MOOC course? Sure. Pictures from some Tumblr page? You bet. You just want the five links you highlighted via the mouse? Just click FlashGot Selection.

This is not an exhaustive list, and I recommend you discover the rest for yourself, in any of the 43 languages FlashGot has been translated to. It adds a layer between the browser and the downloader that feels just right, giving you plenty of options in the browser (or e-mail client) without imposing any restrictions on whichever download manager you choose to use.