Thursday 3 March 2011

Robust Firefox

Today an interesting incident occurred which reassured by trust in Firefox's robustness. Well I was downloading gentoo minimal install image in Google Chrome and after 80mb, the download speed had gone down to some bytes per second. When I started a parallel fresh download, I was getting a speed of about 60 kbps. So, I decided to try and get Chrome download the rest of the original file at about 50 - 60 kbps. I tried the following procedure:

- copy the install*.chrdownload file (i.e. the temporary file into which the file was being downloaded) into some other folder
- cancel the download
- start a fresh download
- pause it
- overwrite the new .chrdowload file with the old one

However, this trick did not work with Chrome. It was still downloading more than 100 mb as if it were the fresh download.

I opened up Firefox and applied the same procedure except for renaming the .chrdownload file to .part file and Firefox intelligently downloaded only what remained of the file completing the download in minutes.

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