DownThemAll: Latest News

DownThemall! 3.0b5, which is the fifth preview release of the upcoming Version 3.0, was just released. It is indented for users willing to cope with bleeding edge software and reporting issues back to us.

This new release is the result of a couple of years of development, and lately focused on taking advantage of recent mozilla technologies, incl. restartless add-ons, asynchronous I/O to make things snappy and better platform integration. It also brings a lot of other major and minor new and improved features and bug fixes.
This beta version in particular addresses some recent changes in Firefox Aurora/Nightly and fixes a nasty memory leak we uncovered.
Additionally, this release addresses some important fixes for problems uncovered in the previous Beta releases and adds a few new features such as manual file naming.

Get DownThemAll! 3.0 Beta 5, release notes and install options
Users of previous Betas should be offered updates in the next couple of days, or upon manually searching for updates.

Thanks for testing
Nils – on behalf of the team

Chrome recently got some support for extensions to access the downloads API. The designer of this API at Google kindly informed us about it.
It now seems possible to do a rudimentary, albeit stripped down version of DownThemAll!, using Chrome’s new capabilities. Advanced features, like segmented downloads, proper checksumming, resuming etc. still do not seem feasible due to technical limitations. However, stuff like filters + OneClick seems to be within reach now. Basically, this new API enables extensions to use the Chrome download manager, but doesn’t give control over the request, data streams and/or low-level details themselves.

This still doesn’t mean you can expect a Chrome version anytime soon, if ever.
Right now there are simply more pressing priorities like getting 3.0 out of the door, and maybe doing a Firefox for Android version.
Also it is not clear if doing a Chrome extension is possible at all, without first actually experimenting with the new Chrome API(s). And after all, doing a chrome version means coding something up from scratch – code sharing is pretty much not directly possible, if alone for the lack of Javascript esnext support in Chrome which the DTA code base already uses extensively in the Mozilla extension – in an environment we’re not very familiar with.

Having said all that, it should be noted that I’m still very much a mozilla fanboi… in the light of recent revelations maybe more than ever.

— Nils