This is basically an extension of 22796 to add my ideas - but I believe it is different enough to include as a different bug and should be. Basically, download accelerator somehow gets all mirrors of a server you are downloading a file from and switches between servers as the file downloads depending on the ping (I think). That way you get a superfast download (I once got 800K on a 10Mb/s total LAN). I think Mozilla should have a default download accelerator that comes with it which can be replaced, of course, if someone downloads a replacement from some other company. Also - you could show download status on the window along with a clickable advertisement that changes every couple minutes. That way, you can make money while people download - YEAH!!! - whaddayathink? Am I evil or what? :) That could be built on top of the 22796 - download before choosing file.

--> networking, marking future, confirming bug.

updating owner

->helpwanted

I would like to say that I think the download accelerator feature should be a plugin. Mozilla would ship its default acceleration plugin, or people could download one from a third party. When you choose to save a file, the Save As Dialog box would come up. If acceleration is enabled, in the bottom of that box, all the mirrors would appear and their pings. When you see some good pings (or all mirrors have been found, or none) you can click "Start Download".

I think this would be best implemented as a default downplugin.

Ok, I have thought about this and my opinion is the only reason for implementing this would be because there is no os-independent Download Accelerator that I can think of.

mass move, v2. qa to me.

BTW - I don't feel this needs to compete with Download Accelerator or any other extremely high quality download accelerator. Just a little better than a normal download. Maybe including the most basic features of Download Accelerator such as resume and mirror finding and switching to replace the old download code.

*** Bug 159529 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Probably the best place for this bug...

*** Bug 144325 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

http://www.filemirrors.com/ - source of mirrors (from bug 144325).

Awesome bug! :D Change "Component" to *Download Manager* ? Suggest to change summary to avoid more dupes: "Support FileMirrors in the Download Manager (Accelerated Downloads)" Some feature suggestions: 1. ping all servers in mirror-list on start. Then auto-select lowest ping server. 2. rightclick: "recalculate speed" 3. Ability to select a _particular_ server. 4. Pref to allow upload of file-servers to filemirrors.com (or other mirrors).

Download accellerator is a resource hog for content providers like me. I don't have a T1, I have a 256k dsl link. And if I put some average-sized binary files for download, the least I expect is for someone to use Download Accellerator to "download my files faster", while in fact what is is really doing is SATURATING MY FIXED-BANDWIDTH CONNECTION, making it impossible for others to get the file at the same time. What download acellerators do, when there is no "mirror" and the file is on a single server is OPEN SEVERAL SIMULTANEOUS CONNECTIONS to the same file, on the SAME SERVER, and requesting different "byte-ranges" from the http server, effectivelly splitting a 10-mb file into ten request for 1-mb byte-ranges of the same file. So I am effectivelly serving 10 simultaneous http requests for a single user. Sounds fair for other users? It is NOT. And I hate it. I would hate to see any sort of "download acellerator" that hogs the content providers' resources into Mozilla. If a third-party wants to develop it and some self-centered careless individual wants to install it and use it, there is nothing we can do to stop them, but adding it into Mozilla would be a BAD SIGNAL. A COUPLE DOZEN SIMULTANEOUS HTTP CONNECTIONS from a single user, just to get "his" file faster is NOT GOOD NETIZENSHIP.

I agree, this is for 3rd parties. Its important that we have a nice download manager, but this is overkill and might even be controversial.

v

Killing this bug mainly because of comment 14 may have been overkill. Mozilla could still use mirrors to find the fastest server(s); download from multiple servers; but if only ONE SERVER is found/available, THEN allow only ONE CONNECTION. Suggest/Request: REOPEN

Ok, I can't believe someome closed this bug as wontfix. There is absolutly no point in adding a download manager to Mozilla without resumed downloads and file segmenting. I know Getright does it. I used Getright for years. Mozilla broke Getright. At least that is their stance. So, I waited until it looked like Mozilla was going to support those features before I finally switched. Now it seems the feature is being dropped because of some lame comment from a web site admin. Multiple file segments are a MUST. They speed up downloads better than any other technology I have used.

Kevin: For Getright to say we broke their commercial software is pure and utter bs. http://www.getright.com/whatsnew.html says that they have plugins to work with Mozilla. There is also http://www.downloadaccelerator.com/ Peter: A stance on WONTFIX can change in the future. It is definately not something that is set in stone, but it is where we think it belongs at this time. If you can get the owner of this component to back adding this, it will be reopened. It could also be placed on Mozdev if some volunteer wants to take this up.

*** Bug 173554 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Adding swarming to the topic because that is a nickname for this feature request.

*** Bug 237571 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

*** Bug 255053 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

*** Bug 75360 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

reopening per bug 75360 comment #28 - it's already assigned to "future" target milestone, so shouldn't do much harm...

re comment #14 -- as an FTP server admin, I totally agree. If this feature is implemented, it should _only_ attempt to access multiple _different_ sites, not the same one multiple times.

Updating out-of-date summary, assigning to module owner, adding portion of comment #26 to status whiteboard. What this will do is actually spread out the load on multiple servers. Putting into consideration what is said in comment #26, otherwise we'll probably be helping the web, because when people go to download files, they often choose the first server in the list. This will help spread out the bandwidth requirements for downloading a file. Maybe connections should be momentarily dropped if they get below a certain speed. That is because the server is probably overloaded and we could be keeping it from catching up (DOSing it unintentionally). Is this something we should do? We can show a tree in the download dialog for this feature. RE comment #18 Do we now support resume yet?

The filemirrors.com bit sounds kindof awkward and problematic. How would you handle layout/other html changes? Do (or would) they offer search results in xml or some other constant format? If so, would they care to get little or no credit for providing the mirror list as this would run behind the scenes? I can't imagine any organization being ok with that unless there's some kindof service fee and I don't believe that would be a reasonable request of Mozilla.org. The only other way I could see this done reliably would be by getting a list of addresses through an additional (?) gethostbyname() call. Obviously, anything behind an Alteon/Foundry/other would be excluded. Aside from rather large mirrors (debian, redhat), how many sites actually make use of a round-robin type configuration? I would guess the number to be rather low and if that's the case, would it still be enough to warrant this feature? As far as the general idea behind these download accelerators goes.. I strongly agree with comment 14 and truely hope that abusive behavior never finds it's way into Mozilla products.

Just wondering if this bug is even still a good one. This one started in 2000. Were "bit torrents" even around then? Maybe this should be moved to a bit torrent creation bug.

This has nothing to do with bittorrent.

What I meant is that things have changed since 2000, and maybe bit torrent can take the place of this function. Over.

I see what you are saying. Like that Fedora uses bittorrent for downloads, and we could integrate the ability to use torrents as mirroring capabilities. I guess that would be a different bug. Unfortunately, I don't know enough about how accelerated downloads work at the lowest level to know whether or not this bug is something that is doable or not.

*** Bug 269330 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

*** Bug 269779 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

*** Bug 269779 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Will this bug be perused or not? It is definitely a worth while to have built in mirroring capabilities. Of course if there is only one mirror, several connections should not be opened to it (as they are in some download accelerators). Also, would a feature that allows capping (in KB) of certain downloads be of interest to more than just I?

*** Bug 322049 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

This bug may depend on bug 230870.

there are a number of posibilities. to this. Certainly with larger files, they can be downloaded in chunks from multiple servers. Assuming auto-resume works, this is not dificult to do. More importantly is general browsing speed. If browsers compete this is one of the critical issues. One way to accelerate downloads of websites is swarming. HTTP/1.1 supports Content-MD5, and MOST website objects are < 64kb (the max size for a UDP packet). A very simple addition to web grabbing could be a sort of swarm handling of websites. a browswer would have to request the MD5's of files (say index.html) to begin with from the original server. but this isn't a big burden on the server. If downloading is slow (error codes: 408, 503, 504) it could reach for a known tracke-tracker (tracker-trackers are easy to solve, and could even be pure p2p, since a charitable or comercial md5/ip lookup and registry service is trivial to build). and from that tracker gain a list of browsers that have registered this MD5 in cache. sending a single small udp request to any of these peers, and returning a single LARGE udp packet with the requested file (zlib is already in firefox). UDP firewall problems have largely been solved these days. Esentialy this would eliminate the slashdot/dig effect. Also since the MD5's have to be retrieved from the actual server, it does not compromise their ability to log trafic, or rotate ads. (tracker-trackers could also benefit by being agrigates of web-traffic statistics, since this feature would be used on THE busyiest websites)

It's 2006 and, as far as I know, 0 Web browsers support segmented / accelerated / multi-threaded downloads. I believe I started using a download manager for this over a decade ago. This was handy on dialup, but on dsl/cable/fiber it's a must. If Firefox supported accelerated downloads, the feature would become more mainstream. This would be a highly visible new feature as it would improve download speeds greatly over other browsers. (To hawk my own solution), I've developed Metalink (bug 331979) which is an XML file used by download managers that contains mirror information for segmented downloads along with checksums & other useful info (p2p, OS, language). One link that has all mirror & checksum info for a file(s). There is a screen capture available of a Metalink being used with GetRight at http://www.metalinker.org/implementation.html#video

I'll like mention that Ant Bryan (comment #40) has a better point than those mirror finding stuff other as said. It's also may be a relief for the website administrator as metalink give flexibility for them as well as a simple interface for the user. this should be a way to go.

Re: comment 39 >a charitable or comercial md5/ip lookup and registry service Re: comment 14 >The filemirrors.com bit sounds kindof awkward and problematic. How would you >handle layout/other html changes? Do (or would) they offer search results in xml >or some other constant format? If so, would they care to get little or no credit >for providing the mirror list as this would run behind the scenes? I can't >imagine any organization being ok with that unless there's some kindof service >fee and I don't believe that would be a reasonable request of Mozilla.org. metamirrors ( http://www.metamirrors.com/ ) links checksums and URLs, similar to filemirrors (which does not use checksums - big security risk). Results are returned as .metalink files (XML format used by download managers). Partial file checksums can be included in .metalinks, to protect against malicious/defective mirrors (so you don't have to wait for the whole download to complete to find out that the checksum doesn't match and you have to start over). Unrelated to metamirrors, DownThemAll (Firefox download manager extension which is also adding metalink support) could be a great gateway for people wanting to try out accelerated downloads without installing a separate app. It doesn't support multiple mirrors yet, but that's being added.

There is a beta Internet browser based on Firefox called Wyzo that has this implemented. http://www.wyzo.com/