
Ask HN: Are download accelerators still a thing? - dazhbog
Hello,<p>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?<p>Thanks!
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aruggirello
On Firefox, I'm using DownThemAll. It has lots of features, including
bandwidth throttling, downloading from multiple mirrors at once, checksumming,
pausing etc.

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balac
I'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.

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penetrarthur
Free 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)

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drakenot
I would look into using aria2, a CLI download utility. It has a '-c' or
'-continue' flag to resume a partial download.

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matbram
Not a gui program, but for Linux, I always love just using wget. Works great,
and very powerful.

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PaulHoule
Try axel which is a drop-in replacement for curl but has the features of a
download accelerator.

