1455520 - Parallel download feature to accelerate download speeds

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Toolkit :: Downloads API, enhancement)

Description

[Benedikt]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; Win64; x64; rv:59.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/59.0
Build ID: 20180323154952

Steps to reproduce:

Download Files with the FF download manager


Actual results:

It is a single download


Expected results:

This is a feature request. I am new here. Please be patient. If I have understood it correctly, the correct way to request a feature is to file a bug.

The download manager should have a Parallel Download Feature to accelerate download speeds.

I don't know if it is planned to leave this feature to add-on developers, but in terms of overall performance enhancements this should be added to FF anyway.

Thank you.

Comment 1

[Gingerbread Man]

I get the feeling that something like this would've been requested already. However I can only turn up
* Bug 40106 which is specifically about downloading the same file in chunks from different servers simultaneously.
* Bug 292255 which covered multiple requests and was duped to one that was fixed.

Comment 2

[Benedikt]

I have submitted this Idea up on reddit 3 months ago and pointed this out several times in threads regarding this feature or add-ons that have it. Maybe you have read it there.

I have asked reddit in a comment if there is an existing bug to this feature, but I did not get an answer. Before I have filed this bug, I did my research found nothing similar and decided to request it.

I think this request is not redundant.

Comment 3

[:Paolo Amadini]

Thanks Benedikt for filing the request and for looking for existing bug reports beforehand. Appreciated! Also thanks to Gingerbread Man for looking up the references in comment 1. As you, I also have a feeling that this request has come up before, but couldn't find a specific bug report. It may have been discussed in the comments of other bugs.

The answer to this specific request is that we don't have plans to implement this feature in Firefox, although we provide infrastructure for add-ons.

Starting multiple "range" requests for the same resource in parallel may sometimes work as a way to increase the bandwidth the server is providing to the client, but may also saturate the connection limits that are set by the browser, the operating system, or the server. This prevents other web pages to load from the same origin.

In other cases, while there may be a perception of acceleration when using add-ons that provide a more detailed view of the chunks that are being downloaded, the completion time is similar whether parallel requests are used or not.

Firefox by default honors the choice of bandwidth limits that are set by the server configuration. Power users that know what they are doing can use add-ons dedicated to download management to work around these limits, with the drawbacks that this involves.

This is for the case of a single origin. The case where multiple download sources are available is covered by bug 40106. I don't expect progress in the near term because, as far as I know, there is no consensus on a web standard that would make mirror discoverability a consistent cross-browser experience for web authors. If anything new comes up in this space, bug 40106 can be used for discussion.