Wow. Didn't expect this :) I was the author of this tiny extension back in the days (extension #201, I still remember it) together with a friend who recently passed away, Federico Parodi.
We hacked the first version when we still didn't know much about JS, but it immediately exploded (500k daily users). Donations were super helpful at that time, being 22 years old with a newborn.
After a couple of years (iirc) Nils Maier joined the team and helped us a lot. Years later he managed to transition the codebase to the new web extension tooling that was introduced by Firefox a few years ago.
This little extension really shaped my professional career. The realization that something I made could have such an impact is what gave me the drive to keep creating small indie products, which I'm still doing nowadays with http://www.datocms.com
Yeah, it was 2006 when I joined you and Federico, if I remember correctly, while you and Federico started DownThemAll! in 2004. #201 is correct :D
2006 was really a long time ago...
DownThemAll! went through a lot of revisions since that time, including the work it took to make it restartless, then make it compatible with "electrolysis" and so on. And in the meantime ensure it didn't break with every Firefox release. But at the core the functionality kept the same. People contacting me with questions could be quite overwhelming - and I am sorry if some of you HN'ers mailed me and I didn't answer - but it was very enjoyable to see what different kinds of people were using our creation and get in touch with all kinds of folks that way, from students downloading lecture videos to movie editors downloading the "dailies", and everything in between.
I am still not happy mozilla decided they had to break all extensions, and I had to do a full rewrite as a WebExtension, and thus abandon a lot of features that simply are not possible anymore with that new API, while at the same time reinvent the wheel for the UI (now being forced to use vanilla HTML, which can be quite hard to get performant enough when people queue a couple of tens of thousands downloads at once). But the very core of functionality, namely selecting and queuing up a lot of links quickly, is still there, so I hope some people still find this new DownThemAll! WebExtension useful.
Lastly, while the last release was indeed 2 years ago, I keep meaning to fix some bugs and make a new release. I was already planning to set aside a lot of time this month for that, even before seeing DTA pop up on HN again. I guess this HN post can only motivate me more :D
Federico's death was incredibly sad. We only met once in person, but he was such a nice and humble guy, not just in real life but online too. I miss him too, may he rest in peace.
As a life-long Firefox user who has been increasingly angry with Mozilla's direction for the browser for the past ten years, I honestly don't know how developers like you could put up with it.
Trashing an entire swathe of extensions - hundreds of thousands of man-hours of work - and then making breaking changes in nearly every subsequent version after that... it's precisely why I've never even considered making a browser extension. It would be pure hell.
It's not exactly that they put up with it, but rather that projects under Mozilla - speaking from my TB experience - are ruled with an iron fist: Censorship, internal secret trials for supposed misconduct, summary expulsions etc. I don't know what it's like for core developers, but I suspect they either keep their head down or it gets chopped off (and thus, the developers who didn't put up with it are probably gone).
> I am still not happy mozilla decided they had to break all extensions
Actually, the weird thing - for those who see FF or TB from the inside - is that the same kind of code we have in regular extensions is still what's used in FF and TB's own chrome (which is in many ways like a bunch of "core extension"). They haven't changed things in a way which makes using extensions impossible, they simply removed the loading mechanisms for them.
Interestingly, for Thunderbird, there's a loophole which most popular extensions use, that allows them to keep loading and running the same kind of extension code they always have:
One of the core technologies of the old extension model, XBL, has been completely ripped out. XBL-defined elements and XBL overlays were how a lot of the old UI customisations functioned, so even if you enable loading the older code it just flat won't work. Obviously custom JavaScript, as in the example you linked, can still do whatever when loaded without restrictions, but then you're at the mercy of changing internals, instead of the supported stable WebExtensions API.
Additionally a lot of XUL in the chrome UI has been removed, replaced with HTML equivalents or custom elements (a descendant of XBL), and the root documents that make up the browser chrome have transitioned from being .xul XUL documents with some HTML elements in to .xhtml HTML documents with some XUL elements in.
As I said elsewhere, I reviewed thousands of addons for addons.mozilla.org back in the day. The number of extensions which used XBL directly were just a handful, and usually by the most capable developers. I have no doubt these developers would have adopted to XBL going away, especially as WebComponents is basically a replacement for most of it.
That some of XUL has gone or was moved to HTML doesn't really matter much either. People could have adopted to this as well. Adopting to ongoing changes in Firefox was the bread-and-butter of extension development before WebExtensions (or the add-on SDK/jetpack), a necessary cost of doing business with the reward of very powerful things you could then do in and to the browser. With JetPack and the Addon SDK mozilla tried to provide stable APIs with some success. Adding WebExtensions to the mix would have helped, just to make it easier for Chrome extensions devs to port their stuff. People not in need of anything besides these stable APIs could use these and be done. People who needed more powerful capabilities would have went the other route and tracked Firefox changes, just like they used to for over a decade already anyway.
There were tons of major breaking changes over the years (Firefox 3.5 to 4 was particularly "bad" IIRC), and while those caused some causalities over the years with abandoned extensions not getting updated (tho most popular add-ons affected got new maintainers or were forked), most extensions kept going, adapting as needed.
I am pretty sure that I could pick up my "legacy" DownThemAll! code now and today, spend a month adopting it, and have a working version for Firefox 94+. A month may sound like a lot for some hobby project, but in an alternate reality where "legacy" add-ons still would be supported, I would have spent that month over a duration of the last 5 years.
But in this reality, I have no supported way to actually load such a "legacy" extension. I could add such a capability back to a Firefox fork, but then only I would be able to use it, but nobody else would... Unless I released the fork, and really, I don't have the resources to maintain an entire Firefox public fork.
Old extentions had way more access to the internals of the browser. When they disabled that access, they also meant they could change internal interfaces faster without breaking so many extensions. So I think it would be possible to make a small source-level tweak and compile a browser that loads old extentions, the individual extensions might not work anymore.
Thanks! This extension was great for archiving materials from MOOCs (Coursera and such) for future reference. Also finding it useful for retrieving a bunch of things from some collections on Internet Archive, where their previews don't work or are broken, etc.
Thank you so much for this! It was truly a lifesaver for a young pirate. My dad blocked torrents on our home network and I hadn't yet learned enough linux to crack our neighbors WEP DownThemAll was key to pirating games and movies off 20+ part rapidshares. <3
That's funny, my internet provider (funky little wireless provider for people who live on mountains) was blocking torrents which made me gravitate towards rapidshare et similia as well.
Incidentally, I wrote several premium link makers back in the day (including one particular implementation which I tried to sell and pirates leaked - oh well, that's what you get when trying to sell to pirates) and I don't remember rapidshare allowing you to download things directly, unless you were premium.
Whoa, never thought I can put in a word of thanks directly to the creator of DownThemAll. Thank you for your contribution - this made my teenager days much more fulfilling. =)
Thank you for authoring DTA! I was a student with no personal computer, and our 3rd world computer labs' download speeds maxed out at about 3kbps and would drop all the time. I had Portable Firefox on a USB disk(thanks John T. Haller) with DTA, which meant I could dare to download live Linux ISOs over some days, which would have been otherwise impossible; live Linux was the hot new thing then. My heartfelt thanks to you, Federico and Nils.
I (Nils) was the maintainer of it for many years at the point already, and I was genuinely considering to let it die for quite a while. I was furious at what mozilla did to the loyal and active extension community and especially on how they did it - essentially by decree without community interaction at all. I was part of the mozilla volunteer army, not just with DownThemAll! and a few other more minor extensions, but I also had been on the team reviewing add-on submissions - I think I reviewed something like 2000-2500 individual submissions including updates in the end - and contributed a few minor bits to Firefox itself. The carelessness of how mozilla approached this large chunk of their community, after declaring their "1 million mozillians" goal not too long before, was mindblowing to me.
I eventually decided not to let it die... DownThemAll! had been a big part of my life, and while I recognized that I had to dumb down the feature set, I saw a way to at least make the core stuff work, maybe. I am glad I tried it even though it required a considerable amount of time to fully rewrite this thing.
The net result of mozilla's move was that they killed a large number of useful extensions entirely, while the survivors then usually became available for Chrome as well thanks to the mostly shared API - DownThemAll! is available for Chrome as well right now - giving users even less incentive to stay with Firefox. Oh well.
Mozilla’s self-sabotaging actions made it seem to me that it was Google’s money talking. That it was a Google funded plan to kill everything that made Firefox great. Really enjoyed Firefox’s heydays and DTA. You guys were a part of saving the internet from IE.
I don't know where this conspiracy theory keeps coming from, but as someone who was there it's definitely untrue. Apply Hanlon's razor.
If Googlers could mind-control Mozilla employees, they wouldn't be sabotaging the browser. They'd be getting Mozilla developers to rubber-stamp their W3C proposals so they could look good on performance reviews.
I agree, it's untrue. In my opinion, most of the problems Firefox has stem from mismanagement and utter lack of vision.
This has a lot to do with mozilla losing their leaders and rock star devs at a rapid pace in the last 10 years. Some golden-parachuted out to the FAANGs, others just shrugged seeing the Mitchell Baker Club got more and more influential in a bad way and looked for less toxic places to work, and of course Eich prominently got cancelled for being against gay marriage and his departure rippled through the entire community. I was subscribed to planet.mozilla and there was a constant stream of "it's been fun, I am moving on" blog posts by names I immediately recognized.
The Code of Conduct situation caused a minor exodus especially in the volunteer community, especially outside of the US. A lot of rather important people, who were the ones building the local communities, just had enough with mozilla corp leadership unilaterally pushing stuff on them without soliciting any feedback first. mozilla was supposed to be this community of equals and Corp dictating more and more things really did not sit well with a lot of folks. Some outright (and sometimes rather publicly) left, others just dialed back their volunteer time a lot. This left especially the Western European communities in shambles.
The WebExtensions switch caused a lot of extension developers (who often were also volunteering in different areas of mozilla) to move on.
The loss of extensions, themes and customization options made a lot of the power users very unhappy. And those power users were exactly the kind of people who kept telling friends and family to use Firefox, driving Firefox adoption. While they often kept using Firefox themselves, they also quite often stopped advocating for Firefox in their circles.
All of this put together, mozilla losing leadership, volunteer, power user and dev mindshare at such a rapid pace then translated directly into a loss of market share.
Major failures such as FirefoxOS and BrowserID furthermore have been very demoralizing, making mozilla leaders very cautious, to the point where you had very little innovation going on from the top down. These failed projects - especially FirefoxOS - furthermore took away a lot of developers from the core product, leaving Firefox in a place where for years they had to play catch up with Chrome.
Things like Rust and servo where went more of a bottom-up direction, with bright engineers pushing it, not so much the leadership. And then these things were the first ones on the cutting block last year.
Google only "helped" in so far that they kept mozilla busy playing catch up, making the situation worse by a ton of (experimental) features and new specs that Firefox then had to implement, thus taking developers from other areas that needed improvement. I think most of the time it wasn't Google's intention to fuck with mozilla tho, it just happened to be the outcome.
I felt the same way about how they killed off the old extensions. It took a lot of work to rewrite my (much smaller) Image Search Options extension, and lots of once key features had to be removed... I tried to work with Mozilla to get a couple minor changes made to enable some of the missing features, but that went nowhere fast. The new extension works, but it's a shadow of its former self. Although I did also port it to chrome (why not, right?) I wound up not publishing the full version. For better or worse, I still feel Firefox is the best browser. Its a small measure, but if my extension has helped keep even a few users, I count that as a win.
The mobile Firefox situation is even bigger mess - there used to be a mozikka maintained Firefox build based on older Firefox cidebase that supported quite many Firefox extensions. Then last summer Mozilla decided to update the codebase and rewrite the GUI on Android. End result ? A hand picked list of essential extensions (Ublock Origin basically and little else) that are available that hardly gets ever extended.
You can add arbitrary exebsions to the android Firefix nightly build, but it involves a lot of unnecessary steps, such as custom extension list creation, id passing and other bullshit.
End result is that the best bet for using extensions on Android is actually Chrome extensions & the Yandex browser of all things, which will just install anything from the Chrome web store (and it often will even work).
>I tried to work with Mozilla to get a couple minor changes made to enable some of the missing features, but that went nowhere fast.
Yeah, unless you actually write the code, there is no way. And writing code for the mozilla code base can be quite intimidating with their mix of C++ and js and XPCOM and not-XPCOM and webidl, etc. I once submitted a patch (unrelated to my extensions) that bounced from the who-is-who of mozilla rockstar devs at the time, and nobody wanted to really even look it because it was changing something so deep within the XPCOM-Javascript bridge and nobody really remembered how it even worked. I finally got my r+ from some brave soul who just said "I don't really know the code it touches either, but somebody has to do the review".
Even if you do the work, it can be an uphill battle to get code in, especially if you're trying to add new features and not just fix existing bugs.
I spoke to people within mozilla back in the day - I was part of the community after all and knew a lot of folks - and they weren't exactly happy, but weren't in a position to make things better, either.
DownThemAll! was big enough that they eventually "officially" reached out and ask me what I need, and then essentially said they couldn't really do any of it, "sorry" and they know "that sucks" (refreshingly honest, at least, but I wasn't talking to upper management but a developer-turned-developer-relations). The person who contacted me, one could tell, was given a mission to appease developers by showing mozilla cared, but wasn't actually provided any resources to really help or support people. All that person could do was to apologize and suggest to read the docs and read the docs on how to propose and implement new APIs - but at the time I had already proposed some new APIs that in my opinion would not just have benefited DownThemAll! but all kinds of add-ons dealing with downloads, and was struck down as "not generally useful to a lot of add-ons, sorry, we do not want to maintain such an API" already.
What I said almost 5 years ago still is true in that regard: they tried to a certain degree to accommodate some of the really popular add-ons, and with some success too, and the smaller add-ons were left in the dust. Not because of ill-will of mozilla, but simply because they lacked the resources to do anything more.
Thank you for such a time-saving extension! I got much more time to read while it was doing what it was doing, instead of endless "right-click, save as" sequences.
Woah, this gives me flashbacks. I remember using this to download files from shady websites on the school computers in the Firefox 3.5 era.
These days, connections have become so fast that I don't really use a download manager anymore. The last place I download large files from through the browser is Mega, and its encryption is inherently incompatible with this addon.
Download Managers is still being used to this day. I have to use a download manager to download a 250MB file that capped the speed at 50KBps... And this is coming from a well-known but shitty printer company. So it took ages to down that and often it would failed. JDownloader2 took care of that since it can do multiple connection to do a quicker download.
If you need a download manager for MEGA, check into JDownloader2. They are compatible with MEGA en/decryption. And developers is very active.
It might be more of an annoyance for the basic "I got a link to a file and I just want to download it" use case, but I use rclone's mega backend: https://rclone.org/mega/
I still use it in cases when a page links to a bunch of individual media files I want to download quickly and without making a complete mess of my downloads folder. Rare nowadays, but find it a lot on academic type websites.
I took GetBot for a spin recently from my downloaded apps archive, but unfortunately it doesn't handle files above 2GB very well -- the remaining bytes/time counter goes nuts. Too bad, I liked its clipboard support where you could also paste a list of URLs it needs to go through.
It's a nice extension, and there was a time when I used it frequently, but the thing is - it should be completely unnecessary.
I already have software which downloads anything I want fast, the issue is, I can't simply connect it to Firefox anymore. Same goes to using external players to view media (I need more nuanced control over rate and pitch of the playback).
I understand it's done in the name of security, but I refuse to accept there's no practical way to allow user to launch software on his own machine from the browser without some auxiliary intermediate program which some older extensions suggested as a way to continue working.
You can use Firefox Developer Edition and make your own addon. It isn't exactly straightforward, especially the "communicate with external software" part (e.g. in Windows you need to put some entry in the registry to let Firefox know what program you need to communicate with) and communication has to be via JSON which in practice means you need to write some sort of proxy app.
But it is possible. I have made my own little addon that calls yt-dlp (previously youtube-dl) with the current URL to save videos from YouTube and other supported places (e.g. Reddit) with a single click. The addon communicates with a Python program to send it the current page's URL which in turn just changes to a predefined directory (where downloaded videos are stored) and calls yt-dlp with that URL.
I was a bit hesitant at first to bother with all that but eventually i decided that it is "my browser" so i should be able to do whatever i want with it and certainly adding a button to call a program with the current URL should be more than possible.
The downside is that Developer Edition updates way more often than regular Firefox which in theory might break stuff but personally i never had an issue with it.
I'm using Firefox Developer Edition so that i can install my addon without having to bother with signing at all.
I do not like the whole signing thing - just like i do not need to sign any -say- Emacs scripts i write, i shouldn't need to sign any browser scripts. Also last time i checked i need to register with Mozilla for this to work and i especially do not want to have some 3rd party's permission so that i can install my own scripts on my own browser. I might have misunderstood that last part but i didn't see much of a reason to bother when i could jus ignore the entire thing with the Developer Edition.
Finally this seems to need npm, node.js, etc to work and i do not want to bother with these things. All i did to make my addon was to use a text editor, make 2-3 files and done. Well, and use regedit but whatever...
Thanks. The first one seems to rely on the fact that aria2 can be remotely controlled. This is good, and in case of aria2 may be even the preferred way of using the combo, but it's not the substitute for the basic launching of one program from the other with some data passing.
The second one needs the "native client" which I mentioned above. It uses effing python to pass the link from the browser to the player! It's a workaround and an ugly complication. The more I use technology the more I come to despise those levels of software strata solving the problem the lower layers introduced for disputable reasons.
Yeah, it's unfortunate that it needs the Python (or Ruby) script as a shim to MPV. But it's not an inherent requirement: the extension could execute MPV directly if MPV understood the weird length-prefixed JSON protocol that Firefox and Chrome use.
If the app supports deep linking, then a browser can open up content in an app. See most video conference links.
I imagine a browser extensions that adds deep-links for certain media to be opened in external software is possible. Just needs coordination with the app...
I'll be the brave one to say it: download entire image-based porn sites in one click. Porn has gone almost entirely video now, so the days of galleries have largely disappeared. There were auto-indexers as well that would increment URLs based on patterns.
Still, one could reasonably expect that applying a functional pipeline to web page contents (extract and filter links, pipe them into the download queue) should be regular web browser functionality.
Should I only use the one provided by my Web browser? Should I not download the content that I want to access locally or share between devices without being obliged to stream/download it again from a server?
The thing is, a browser is already "managing" downloads. If browsers implemented their internal download management reasonably, people would mostly not need to bother with an extension.
Yes, they are still useful. Download managers can download specific range of files that we are only interested in which it can be filtered out. Like youtube-dl and gallery-dl, they are a specialized download manager and did amazing job with it.
If I find a gallery of images that I like to keep. I can use gallery-dl for that and use gallery-dl "instagram.com/boburnham" in the command line and it will crawl and download the images within the gallery.
IIRC when I couldn't use DTA anymore I used to take a local copy of a page, change 'a' tags to 'img' tags and 'href' to 'src', and then save web page complete. Got me a folder with the downloads in it. Rough and ready!
There was nothing more frustrating than trying to download a file of a few megabytes back in the long, long ago, and then something would glitch out at 90%, and you'd have to start over again on your dial-up connection. Download managers that could resume an interrupted download were a game changer.
Modern browsers still suck at dealing with downloads if you have a flaky connection that gets interrupted, but we mostly don't care because you can slurp gigabytes in seconds on fiber connections, so it takes a really, really jacked up VPN connection or intrusive proxy to make an impact.
I dislike this, trend it seems, of putting the language in the URL -- the Accept-Language HTTP header should be used which can express weighted preferences. Mozilla does use the header but redirects to the language (and product) specific URL which is usually okay for me but bad for sharing (IMO, obviously). But, https://addons.mozilla.org/addon/downthemall/ "works".
I was a very happy user of DownThemAll at work for a few years. I had to retrieve boatloads of documents from $BIGCO's godawful Sharepoint site on the regular. After a couple sessions wearing out my carpal tunnel mousing around, right clicking on icons, and going through the File Save dialog hundreds of times, I knew there had to be a better way. DownThemAll was that better way. Thank you for your work.
I think it's more that DTA was a victim of FF Quantum.
> We are therefore limited to the tools the WebExtensions model provides to us, which sadly makes it impossible to provide some of the advanced features of DownThemAll! Version 3.
I didn't even know they attempted a WebExtension rewrite and am not surprised that it wasn't able to do the things that made the old DTA worth using.
that's exactly the case. the rewrite took years, and it is only somewhat functional, but I don't blame the dev. pre-quantum version was a finished product, and then suddenly it had to be written from scratch again. I'm surprised he had bothered to do that at all, personally I'd never contribute anything to firefox again after that fucking stunt.
Do you see any hope for a fork of modern Firefox that start with just the tiniest stuff, maybe adding back a simple tab strip api to let Tree Style Tabs work properly again, that kind of stuff, then go on to put Mozilla out of business as soon as the economy allows it?
I'm only halfway joking here, and only about putting Mozilla out of business.
No. Who would use it? The few hundred thousand who want Tree Style Tabs?
Separately, keeping a browser up-to-date with new standards and security fixes is a huge undertaking. You would need a lot of engineers invested in such a project.
By the way, Nils from DownThemAll is a great guy. He wrote a scathing blog post at the time Mozilla announced dropping support for "legacy" extensions. Wish I could find it.
> casually dismissed "a few hundred thousand" users whose lives were impacted as a non-issue.
I did not intend that. My intention is this: "the cost of maintaining a browser with up-to-date standards and security is enormous". A few hundred thousand users who are unlikely to pay anything for such a browser is just financially not viable.
Just to put into perspective, maintaining a full browser (with its own engine etc) costs at minimum $300M/year (judging by the size of Chrome/Firefox/Safari's teams). That means that 300k users would need to pay more than $80 a MONTH to make that sustainable. That's insane.
> No. Who would use it? The few hundred thousand who want Tree Style Tabs?
No, I want the few tens of million ex-Firefox users that have left during the last decade because of being annoyed or because of the pragmatic reason that Firefox doesn't offer any experienced direct advantage anymore while Chrome is pushed heavily and has a experienced direct advantage: that Google web properties are optimized, not sabotaged on it.
> Separately, keeping a browser up-to-date with new standards and security fixes is a huge undertaking. You would need a lot of engineers invested in such a project.
Here I should have been more precise: I mean to start with a soft fork. Start by building from ordinary Firefox with just small patches to fix the worst offenders like the tab strip API and restoring the UI.
> No, I want the few tens of million ex-Firefox users that have left during the last decade because of being annoyed or because of the pragmatic reason that Firefox doesn't offer any experienced direct advantage anymore while Chrome is pushed heavily and has a experienced direct advantage: that Google web properties are optimized, not sabotaged on it.
Me too.
Leadership at Mozilla is interested more in social justice, diversity, and equity issues than engineering issues. Don't look for this to come from today's Mozilla.
There is lately a push for privacy issues at Mozilla, which is nice to see.
> Do you see any hope for a fork of modern Firefox that start with just the tiniest stuff, maybe adding back a simple tab strip api
Why bother with the overhead of a fork? Perhaps a team of volunteers could put together a good enough proposal to be accepted by the WebExtensions team.
I used to work at Mozilla and periodically checked the status of the "add API to hide the tab bar" bug.
I don't think anybody was directly opposed, but there were a lot of hidden edge cases that needed to be dealt with.
Even though full-time devs might not have time allocated to doing this themselves, they are open to accepting solutions as long as the contributions are thorough and follow up on their concerns.
Unfortunately IMHO most submissions these days are more like "this looks simple to me, just do it!" instead of a genuine engagement. To some people, that looks like opposition.
Yeah, I don't see how the maintainers can patch security vulns or add support for newer web features (e.g. CSS variables) when the upstream fork is no longer maintained. They would have to write the fixes themselves, which just does not scale for a project that has 1 or 2 developers working on it part-time.
I think we're at a point where there are enough sites out there that we can avoid a good portion of them (i.e. ones written without progressive enhancement in mind) and still be happy.
For example, I am quite happy with visiting only sites which do not require JavaScript, do not use cookie banners, paywalls, and registration prompts.
For my purposes of browsing Teddit, HN, and my own websites, there are more than 20 beautiful, usable, friendly browsers I can think of just off the top of my head.
For everything else, I just close the tab and move on. Past experience leads me to believe I'm not missing much, because sites which break these requirements usually have crap content too.
If I really need something, I can open Chromium (with UO and Vimium) for that particular site and then close it afterwards.
It feels to me like "my" Web has already passed the bottom of the valley, and is only improving with time.
Only a couple years ago there was no Teddit or Nitter, and now they are here.
I'm finding more and more usable sites almost every day, and I'm missing anything less and less frequently.
A couple years ago, I was mostly down-voted for pleading for noJS support here on HN, and now it's the opposite.
I'm feeling optimistic. The biggest thorn in my side right now is SSL/HSTS, which is a very fast treadmill. I'm praying for an easy-to-use and transparent SSL-stripping proxy I can use in the near future, which will make things even better on machines I control.
I'm curious how far they even tried to replicate the old feature-set. Firefox out-of-box has awful limitations, but they offer also ways to circumvent them with integration of external helpers. There are several WebExtension who offer additional features with helper-scripts. A downloadmanager seems to be the perfect example for walking this road.
For a downloader, that might be a bit of a bad sign. As pages like youtube change, downloader software code needs to change to keep up. See youtube-dl as an example.
This software only provides a means to batch and automate things you'd have to manually download through "save link as". It's not chasing a moving target like youtube-dl.
It's quite useful where you have 50 PDFs on a school page and you'd like to download them all without manually clicking save link as on each one of them. I have fond memories of DTA from my bachelor studies.
I (Nils) am the maintainer, and I would more characterize it as slumbering, not entirely abandoned or dead. I keep meaning to fix bugs and make new releases, but as we all know the last two years have been a bit crazy ;) I know, that's a lame excuse, and I already planned to do better now that things in the world finally seem to settle down a little, even before seeing this little reminder pop up on HN.
To prevent all downloading, not just automatic. When they remove a video, they don't want you to have an archived copy to prove the content ever existed, or to watch it without their permission.
Actually, youtube-dl is dead at the moment for reasons of private life of the maintainer. So people now use a fork called yt-dlp. Which is ironic, because most people moved when google started to use a new harsh speed-limitation.
Thanks for that. I don’t watch many YouTube videos but when I do, I usually use youtube-dl as provided by the Debian Testing package. I wasn’t aware of the yt-dlp project¹ and I’d been wondering why the video downloads were so slow over the past few weeks.
I've been using this for decades. Originally I pirated it when I was younger but recently bought a lifetime licence (very affordable!) and it's genuinely a great tool if you're on Windows. Does help download speeds too if you're on an ISP where single thread speeds can be a bit rubbish (Virgin Media in the UK). Gets updated often too.
Wow, I hadn't expected this to come back given the wind and weather of the present internet! I routinely used this back in the early 2010s, but then I switched to wget (and Chrome) as Firefox destroyed the plugin by changing its addon language.
We hacked the first version when we still didn't know much about JS, but it immediately exploded (500k daily users). Donations were super helpful at that time, being 22 years old with a newborn.
After a couple of years (iirc) Nils Maier joined the team and helped us a lot. Years later he managed to transition the codebase to the new web extension tooling that was introduced by Firefox a few years ago.
This little extension really shaped my professional career. The realization that something I made could have such an impact is what gave me the drive to keep creating small indie products, which I'm still doing nowadays with http://www.datocms.com
Thanks for making my day! :)