Auto Resume Interrupted Downloads in Mozilla Firefox

When downloading a large file in Mozilla Firefox browser, sometimes your downloads get interrupted because of many reasons – unreliable internet connection, file system error, antivirus blocking files and many others. In these cases, you can simply resume the downloads if you are actively monitoring the download process yourself. But if you are away from the computer after starting one or more downloads, then your downloads will be stopped until the time you come back to check your downloads and manually resume them.

If you want Firefox to automatically resume any interrupted downloads then you can use a Firefox extension called Auto Resume Downloads. As the name suggests, it can restart all the downloads that have stopped in the middle for any reason. The extension is very simple and presents no user interface or options at all. You can install it and forget about it.

Firefox Resume Downloads

According to the source-code of the extension, it will keep checking for interrupted downloads every 60 seconds and if it finds a download that has failed for some reason, it will attempt to resume it. The download may or may not resume depending on the reason why it failed in the first place. It checks if the downloads were cancelled by the user or were stopped because the user closed the browser window – in both cases it does not resume the downloads.

If the downloads were interrupted because of file system error, file access error or if your antivirus blocked the download, then even resuming the downloads won’t fix the issue as it will be interrupted again and again. In these cases, it is better to cancel the downloads as the extension will ignore the downloads if they have been cancelled by the user.

You can download and install Auto Resume Downloads extension for Firefox from https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/auto-resume-downloads/.

One comment

  1. Unfortunately, the latest versions of Firefox believes it knows better and prevents this add-on from working.

    With Australia’s super efficient (NOT) NBN, this means you have to manually monitor downloads and restart failed downloads.

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