Kerkia

Background

When you start downloading large and multiple files, relying on a browser to remain open, on a connection to remain stable, on a computer that has to remain on, etc. can become challenging. Download managers are the solution and they typically allow concurrent downloading, pausing downloading, integrate well with your web browser, supports all sorts of different protocols for you, and are even faster than regular download tools.

Recommendations

Our main recommendation goes to Free Download Manager. This tool integrates with all major browsers including Chrome, which is not that frequent yet in other tools, and supports a large range of protocols. It can also download from RapidShare, supports BitTorrent in the latest releases (a nice addition but we have not tested its performance yet since we use other tools for BitTorrent download), and also supports flash video content.

For those of you who want to focus on speed rather than features, then Gigaset is for you. It features the fastest download times by far and is a powerful tool though we regret the lack of Chrome support; hopefully this will come soon. Flash is also supported, and the user community for this tool seems to be very large in Asia especially.

Our last recommendation is Orbit. This tool also supports most protocols, and its particularity is to focus on social and web content, with a nice integration with video sites such as YouTube, support for Pandora or MySpace, but it seems no support for Chrome yet.

Web links

Free Download Manager

Web site: http://www.freedownloadmanager.org/index.htm

Download: http://www.freedownloadmanager.org/download.htm

Gigaset

Web site: http://gigaget.com/index.htm

Download: http://gigaget.com/download.htm

Orbit

Web site: http://www.orbitdownloader.com/index.htm

Download: http://www.orbitdownloader.com/download.htm