Has anyone been having problems with Free Download Manager catching downloads recently?
It would catch downloads from some websites but not others.
For example, if I press Ctrl+S on any website, it opens the firefox download dialogue rather then prompting in FDM.
I contacted the support team, and after a lengthy conversation, they asked me whether I’ve tested it on any other Linux device, and unfortunately, the only other Manjaro laptop in this house is one with a broken charger with a dead battery (the other 6 are Mint machines unfortunately. I’ll take those over one day…I’ll ask Murphy for help…her daddy shouldn’t mind, as he, @winnie, seems to like to take things over ), and my VM hasn’t been updated for more than…a long time.
So I wanted to ask if anyone else is facing this problem so I can report to the support team.
My apologies for not answering your question - I can’t - but when replying to another topic on download managers - I came across Persepolis - FOSS and available in official repo (arch maintained) - including browser add-ons.
And when you posted that reply, I quickly slammed yay -S persepolis into my terminal.
But I found that FDM has a better UI and better features in my opinion
Just attempted to download a file and fdm came up immediately. You do have the free download manager extension installed? Are you using firefox from the repo, flatpak, or snap?
I did mention that some files from some websites are caught by fdm (which implies that I have the extension installed), so can you please share the download link that was caught by fdm please, very much appreciated
Can you try…
…and let me know if the page is caught in fdm.
From the version that comes from a fresh install (from the repo)
Ctrl + S is the firefox shortcut for downloading a web page. As far as I know FDM is only setup to handle file downloads, not site downloads.
Edit: Turns out I was wrong!
FDM does have an option to handle downloading a whole site. It’s in the right-click context menu as “Download all with Free Download Manager”
Can you give me a link that fdm catches please.
One example of a file download link that isn’t caught by fdm is the downloads from the “Locally generated test files” section from this site:
The other files are caught though, which is weird…
Only the right-click context works, which means that it only works when I have the link and I right-click on it and select “Download with Free Download Manager”. Most of the time I don’t have a link to right-click on.
So could you do me a favor and download a file from the
Network generated files will download with FDM, locally generated ones will not.
My (semi) educated guess:
Locally generated files won’t trigger a file download with FDM because it’s not a file transfer from a remote location. The file is being created locally, therefore it’s a file operation on the local OS. Firefox just uses the same dialogue for both types of operations.
Nope, FDM didn’t catch it. I’m guessing that it has to do with the size of the file, firefox is just handling the download too fast for FDM to trigger properly. I see the same thing happen on very small files from other sites. The only work around I can see is using the right-click context and “Download with Free Download Manager” option.
I tested chrome FDM extension, and all the links that weren’t caught in FDM using firefox were caught using chrome. It seems to be a firefox issue.
Thanks @fefniir for helping me in this investigation.
I’ll email them beck with the results, and if they tell me to switch to chrome then I’ll…
), and my VM hasn’t been updated for more than…a long time.
