Discussion on Firefox download manager appears broken

October 22, 2009: 7:54 pm
I was having the same problem downloading an Oracle file using Firefox - it would appear to go to a limbo state after downloading 99%. I tried switching to IE, which Oracle recommended - it was one of their files I am downloading. The same exact thing is happening with IE. In the meantime, I just paid $75 for an e-book I cant open without this Secured PDF opener file.

September 20, 2008: 12:46 pm
Thank You guys... you were too helpful... :)

March 25, 2008: 8:46 pm
thx everyyone.

January 16, 2008: 12:27 pm
THANK YOU Went into C:\Documents and Settings\Bill\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\stkdv2o6.default and deleted DOWNLOADS.RDF and I have my DL manager back. Hope that path helps the next person with this problem.

December 19, 2007: 3:22 am
Try deleting downloads.rdf in the profile folder.

October 29, 2007: 9:32 am
Yes I download GetRight and it resumed by broken Firefox download. You saved me downloading 1.5GB again. Thanks.

September 13, 2007: 8:36 am
Download Getright, it will allow you to resume your .part files caused by firefox. Ben

July 31, 2007: 8:52 am
Talk about frustrating. Try downloading the same file 59 different times only to have the dumb thing freeze continuously what a waste of time. I would definitely appreciate a change to F.F. download manager as well or find a browser that is actually decent enough to have already corrected this problem . I am a cable user with WOW and I have their lowest paying package. Needless to say, even with cable this still presents a problem. SO HEY FIX THE PROBLEM ALREADY!!!!!! (Please??!)

July 9, 2007: 1:28 pm
I HAV GOT A VIRUS FOR FIREFOX, I M NOT ABLE TO OPEN IT FROM FEW DAYS.....I REALLY LUV THIS BROWSER BUT HELP ME OUT, WHENEVER I TRY TO OPEN IT PROMPTS"USE IE OR ELSE YOU DOPE"PLZ DO THE NEEDFULL....

June 6, 2007: 2:17 pm
I could of swore 1 gigabyte equals 1,024 megabytes.

May 29, 2007: 4:14 am
i got a similar problem on my Windowns 2000 machine. Firefox's download manager always worked very well for me, even on 64Kb/s ISDN. Even pausing downloads went incredibly smooth. I have installed Free Download Manager some time back but replaced it recently with FlashGet (but GetRight seems good to!). I started noticing that I have difficulty right-clicking and saving images, so I used FDM to do it. Then I realized the FF download manager is *broken*. Firefox still downloads files to my HD, the .part files are visible. But it's completely silent. No poping up the download manager and no indication of progress. If I close FF it doesn't warn me of losing the download. This *totally sucks*. With the advent of FF 2.0 I ran into another ugly problem: clicking the OK button on the bookmark dialog *wipes out the title of the bookmark*. The topmost "Bookmarks" folder doesnt like to be selected in the list either i have to open the list and select it. So all my bookmarks now have a trailing space. I love this browser - but it can really do with a sourcecode service.

May 19, 2007: 8:00 am
FIREFOX stopped at 99% after I downloaded a 1 gig file that took 12 hours, I've been trying to get the file for two days.... it's from a site where I can't use a download mananager so I can't resume if anything goes wrong. It was at fucking 967 out of 978 megs... You can imagine how pissed I was....

April 18, 2007: 12:02 pm
hi, i was downloading FREE avg antivirus via firefox downloader with a peace of mind that i could restart the download just in case. But I was wrong. After 85% of the total download i.e. 16MB via a 1kbps wireless internet connection and about 5 hours, I am left with no option except to go out of my home to a net cafe with a better internet speed. I thought firefox download manager will come to my help, but ALAS, i was utterly wrong in presuming. this is an open source software and such a critical error should have beeen resolved at least by the 50th release of firefox. Anyways, i continue using firefox as i got no other option. But in future, I will start to use getright as my favourite downloder software. sorry, but firefox should have this nice feature properly built or NOT included at best.

December 29, 2006: 10:57 pm
happens to me all the time. the download manager marks the download as complete while only a portion of it is downloaded. and it happens to all versions of ff, nobody solved this bug i guess. i'm a frequent downloader and this hell tells me that ff ain't as good as you all think. now i really hate ff.

December 24, 2006: 11:43 am
damn, FF fails me again it just paused at 2 gigabytes downloading a 2.5 gig file from a ftp. resume does not work! Pressing cancel deletes the file entirely. I left my computer on all night to download this file and it was hard for me to sleep from all the fan noise, thanks a lot FF.

November 13, 2006: 5:55 am
I love firefox, but this stuff happens to me all the time! The download manager is horrible. How often have you gotten through 96% of a large file only for it to completely stop everything it is doing and hang there? Then you can't finish the download, you have to restart it and have it happen again. It's not a slow connection for me. My connection is great. I actually have to use Internet Explorer to download files nowadays b/c of how crappy FF's downloader is. And I HATE IE!!!!

October 28, 2006: 12:19 pm
Hi Its sad to see download manager report "download complete" for cases where the internet link gets disconnected or line drops. Ironically, same download manager which knows before hand that the download file is of 4.6mb does not realise that at 1.4mb download its corrupted. it should actually pause and wait for user to ensure that link is up again and resume from there - i dont know if anyone has pointed it out earlier or this is taken care by some add-on. guys/gals pls throw some light on any tips or tricks you would know to avoid this. regards limited

October 24, 2006: 5:51 am
I'm using broadand and I normally have no trouble at least starting downloads of any size with firefox. The problem is the pause function. When I try to resume a paused download, the gauge instantly fills up as if it were complete.

October 6, 2006: 3:19 pm
Mine doesn't even came up. And i open it via Cltr J short cut, and the download list is empty even though it is actually still downloading the stuff i intended to download. I tried to reinstall the firefox, it doens't work. Nothing seem to work for me so far. Does anyone know any trick to correct this?

September 30, 2006: 8:33 pm
I try to download from Firefox and the box comes up like it is suppose to. I click save to disk...then it just says that the d/l is complete instantly without even d/l anything at all. Why's this? does anyone else have this problem?

September 13, 2006: 3:07 am
in cases like this, I use Opera to download large files :) IE for a stupid IE-only online banking site and Firefox for all the rest

September 8, 2006: 9:47 pm
Still a constant problem on dial-up trying to down-load a 1 meg file attachment from gmail even with the latest program updates. I had been getting 99% cpu cycles (watching task manager) until I cleaned up the down-load manager. Thought I had the problem solved with that suggestion ... but no, it still failed even with cpu cycles running low.

June 22, 2006: 12:25 am
Hi This bug is still present in 1.5.0.4. Downloading at home works fine, but at work the Internet connection is not quite as smooth and the Firefox progress bar just stops. I have to copy the link to Safari, which maintains the download 'connection' just fine.

April 28, 2006: 9:30 pm
happens to me all da time.. aaarghhhhhh

April 13, 2006: 5:16 pm
1.5.0.1's download manager has the same problem -- I just lost 46MB of a 96MB download (on dial-up) due to this. This is the worst deficiency of the browser!

March 13, 2006: 6:58 am
how to get download resume after power failier

February 26, 2006: 4:09 pm
Yes I have installed extentions. Is there any particular one that might be the problem? Thank you.

February 26, 2006: 3:34 am
Have you install any new extensions?

February 25, 2006: 7:45 pm
My download manager doesn't look the same or work the same as it did before. I don't have a clue what changed it. It used to be a large box with a graph showing the progress of the download and options I could choose. I could scroll through all my downloads to date. Now it's a long small horizontal box that doesn't show anything or let me do anything and it doesn't show my previous downloads.

February 4, 2006: 12:32 am
i have had this problem for MONTHS and MONTHS. everytime i "save image as" firefox downloader opens and all firefox windows freeze. They can freeze for minutes at a time and if i am trying to download many images this can get very very frustrating. I have searched the internet for a solution for months to no avail, until today. Once I cleared the downloads the problem disappeared. thank you.

December 15, 2005: 2:58 pm
Had the same problem, removed all the previous downloads and things work fine now.

December 9, 2005: 9:41 am
I have observed the following behaviour very consistently with Firefox 1.0 and 1.5: If I already have one donwload running, that download will stop when I start a second download. The dialog box that lets me specify the second download path takes a very long time to close, and then nothing happens for a minute or more. I see zero activity on my internet connection during this very long pause. After a mionute or so of no activity, both downloads will start to move. If I try to open another instance of Firefox during the long pause, it just sits there and does nothing until the pause is over. It looks to me like there's some kind of deadlock in the download manager.

December 8, 2005: 6:09 am
Spent the better part of my night downloading two 800+ mb files and one of them is currently hung at 79%. I've paused it, restarted, and done pretty much everything short of cancelling the download and still nothing. This is the first and only issue I've ever had with Firefox and hopefully it will be the last. It would be a shame to have to get used to another browser so soon after doing so with Mozilla.

August 22, 2005: 9:10 am
I have had the download problem as well. If you select TOOLS and DOWNLOADS you can remove the list of downloaded items (and failed). Then you can resume downloading without problems... ;)

June 2, 2005: 12:23 am
The easiest answer might be to allow connecting to some other download managers such as wget. It looks as if java has something to do with the problem.

May 17, 2005: 3:02 pm
@SoloFlyer and others Please update the bug description https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=291665 with your observations and also vote for it. Your vote will ensure that it gets fixed. @SoloFlyer I just copy the URL and paste it to DAP, a pain nevertheless.

May 17, 2005: 2:29 pm
I also have this problem it seems to happen when there is a connection problem between me and the download host. it seems some hosts will drop the http transfer but end the TCP session nicely FireFox wont recognize that the total bytes and bytes received are not the same and doesn't reconnect to finish the transfer, the result is files of any size (I've had files as small as 200k not finish) are marked completed when they aren't... If the TCP session doesn't finish nicely FireFox will behave correctly and won't mark the download as complete (although FireFox doesn't seem to want to resume unfinished downloads...) This can be replicated by setting up a say a web server start downloading from the web server and pull out the network cable ff will just sit and wait... but if in the same scenario you kill apache instead of pulling the network cable the TCP connection will finish nicely (well nicer :P ) and assume the download has finished.. I assume that this happens in real life when the web server you are downloading from for some reason kills your http session (e.g. TCP still finishes nicely) This problem had been in every version of ff I have used from 0.9 - 1.04 Currently I am using wget when I want to download anything...

May 17, 2005: 2:49 am
Firefox on my WinXP machine has a broken downloader. Initiating download hangs a bit, opens the downloader, then just hangs the browser. Once in a while it will recover after many minutes. Mostly I use the task manager to kill the process which oddly also takes several minutes for it to actually shut down. Firefox on my Linux box downloads fine.

April 25, 2005: 9:43 am
@angsuman: Thanks :)

April 23, 2005: 1:36 pm
@Daf Check https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=291665 and https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=276254 Feel free add to it as you feel appropriate.

April 22, 2005: 10:30 pm
It can also happen with broadband as long as the connection is crappy, it happens all to me all the time. These days I just start the download with Firefox and pass the link to GetRight which does the job properly. Did you report a bug on this? I've been trying to find something on Bugzilla about this.

April 19, 2005: 12:01 pm
yes indeed it happened to me several times whilst downloading Roxio Creator 7.5 at 900+Mb a little anoying then found the extension Download Manager Tweak, Im using broadband but still a problem what good is pausing if resume never works!

April 12, 2005: 5:23 am
@Rolly Are you using Broadband? At high speed it is most often not an issue. The problem is very much visible at low speeds.

April 12, 2005: 4:05 am
Hmmmm. Thats weird. I have never really had any problems with FF download, and frequently download huge files from multiple sources.

March 17, 2005: 8:18 pm
Nowadays I actually copy the final download URL and feed it to DAP! Not only does Firefox download fails, it also hangs and doesn't recover.

March 16, 2005: 6:06 pm
fully corroborate your opinion, and have to add: It doesnt support download of more then two files even from different sources, cannot download lists, resume as a rule is broken, in a nutshell it goes in the same groove as microsoft only with a difference that you are incapable to install other managers that work smoothly with firefox and cover those lacks

March 8, 2005: 7:10 am
since 3 days I work with Firefox, replacing Netscape 7. All works well, with the exception of downloads. The download- manager opens and after a while reaches a deadlock. The only thing I can do is ctrl-Alt-Del. In the Headerline I can see the meassage PS: 603.3 MB. There seems to be no way to cancel downloads! Even saving files to my harddisk does no work, because of this deadlock of the downloadmanager! What can be the reason, please?

February 5, 2005: 1:22 pm
I had a whole comment typed out how this happens to me all the time, how it was happening RIGHT NOW AND YOUR VALIDATION CODE WAS UNREADABLE SO I LOST THE WHOLE COMMENT. I think I hate captcha as much as firefox. <moderated for Slang - Editor>

February 1, 2005: 11:57 pm
Well, go file a bug report then.