A download manager is a type of software that manages the downloading of files from the Internet. The best download managers help make the process easier and quicker.
If you often download multiple files, particularly large files such as ISOs and backups, a download manager can help streamline the process. Downloading files – such as music, video, programs, drivers, and more through a browser – is never the fastest. Besides maximising your bandwidth, a download manager also offers the ability to resume a download after a connection fails.
AB Download Manager is software which is designed to make it easier and quicker to download files from anywhere. It runs as a standalone desktop app and also offers browser extension support for Firefox and Google Chrome. AB Download Manager is free and open source software.
Installation
We evaluated AB Download Manager using Manjaro, an Arch-based distro, as well as the elegant Ubuntu 24.10 distro.
With Manjaro, Pamac (Manjaro’s front-end installation tool) lets us install Parabolic from the Arch User Repository (AUR).
As you can see, we selected to install the source package from the AUR.
A few packages are needed. But hang on. The source package in the AUR is actually older than the binary package. And the source package failed to install as the ab-download-mananger file did not pass a validity package. Instead, we installed the binary package which proceeded with no issues.
The project provides a deb package for Ubuntu/Debian. On our Ubuntu test system, we used that package. There’s also a tar.gz file to download which is an un-packaged binary.
Besides Linux, the software also supports Windows. We didn’t test the Windows version.
Next page: Page 2 – In Operation and Summary
Pages in this article:
Page 1 – Introduction and Installation
Page 2 – In Operation and Summary