DownThemAll: Latest News

After a rather long long time, with many new things to address such as Australis, e10s, limited time we could spend on the project, a little lack of motivation after mozilla required mostly pointless signatures and announced to kill XUL add-ons…
And still spending lots and lots of hours, coding, improving and testing DownThemAll! in our free time and the awesome work by volunteer translators (on babelzilla) and fast review by Noitidart from the mozilla AMO team…

Here it finally is: DownThemAll! version 3
And an unavoidable fact is: nobody is perfect, so new versions means new bugs.
Therefore we make available the first bug fix release of DownThemAll!, with the version number 3.0.3.

Get it from addons.mozilla.org and/or see our release page!

Nils
— for the DownThemAll! team

PS: Also say hi to our new Git repository, currently hosted on GitHub.

After a rather long long time, with many new things to address such as Australis, e10s, limited time we could spend on the project, a little lack of motivation after mozilla required mostly pointless signatures and announced to kill XUL add-ons…
And still spending lots and lots of hours, coding, improving and testing DownThemAll! in our free time and the awesome work by volunteer translators (on babelzilla) and fast review by Noitidart from the mozilla AMO team…

Here it finally is: DownThemAll! version 3

Get it from addons.mozilla.org and/or see our release page!

Nils
— for the DownThemAll! team

PS: Also say hi to our new Git repository, currently hosted on GitHub.

DownThemAll! 3.0 is finally nearing a release, and we are looking for people to translate it.
If you’re an existing translator, you should have gotten mail from babelzilla.

If not, head over to babelzilla, register an account, find the DownThemAll! extension, and start localizing.

If you run into troubles or cannot sign up because a translation is closed, then please leave a note in the forum topic.

Thanks in advance to all translators!

Mozilla just announced their intent to deprecate so called XUL-based add-ons in favor of what they call the WebExtensions API within the next year or two. The WebExtensions API is supposed to be mostly compatible to Chrome/Safari extension APIs.

What does this mean for DownThemAll!? Well, for starters, DownThemAll! will be dead if XUL-based add-ons with XPCOM access are gone. Simple as that. The new APIs would only allow for a severely limited in functionality, severely stripped down DownThemAll! at best.

Gone with DownThemAll! will be add-ons that e.g. let you change major bits about the Firefox user interface (e.g. tabs tree add-ons), add-ons that allow you to do more “advanced” stuff than just showing or slightly altering websites, such as e.g. restarting the browser upon click (unless mozilla kindly provides an API for that, which won’t be compatible with Chrome, of course). Add-ons like NoScript will be severely limited in their feature set as well. Say byebye to Greasemonkey and hello to Tampermonkey, with it’s limitations. Want that add-on that lets you change the new tab page for something else or enhances that page? Maybe it will be available, maybe not, depending on if and when mozilla kindly provides WebExtensions APIs for such things. And of course, depending on if there will be an author creating this entirely new add-on from scratch.

What this also means: Almost all your existing add-ons will be broken, entirely, save for some Add-on SDK add-ons, namely those that don’t do anything fancy. Sure, even today, lots of add-ons break, and some add-ons will not get updated when they do and there are no suitable replacements. However, with this change, almost every add-on will be completely broken and in need of major updating by the extension authors. Good luck with that.

It is safe to say, that Firefox will not be Firefox anymore as far as extensions go, but instead will become yet another Chrome-clone.

To be clear: I was furious when the extension signing stuff was announced and then actually implemented, which effectively created yet another Walled Garden, but regarding this announcement I am just sad. Right now, it feels like I just learned my dear old friend Firefox is going to die.

DownThemall! 3.0b6, which is the sixth 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, e10s multi-process browsing 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 6, 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

DownThemAll! 2.0.17, which is the 16th maintenance release of DownThemAll! 2, was just released, fixing some compatibility issues, updating the shipped locales and addressing some minor bugs.

Release Notes and Download

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

DownThemAll! 2.0.16, which is the 16th maintenance release of DownThemAll! 2, was just released, fixing some compatibility issues, updating the shipped locales and addressing some minor bugs.

Release Notes and Download

DownThemall! 3.0b4, which is the forth 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.
Additionally, this release addresses some important fixes for problems uncovered in the previous Beta releases.

Get DownThemAll! 3.0 Beta 4, release notes and install options

Thanks for testing
Nils – on behalf of the team