Firefox aborts LARGE downloads on completion with an 'unknown error' and the whole file has to be downloaded again - surely there must be a workfile somewhere?
Because I only have satellite internet available to me, I have to download YouTube files in my download window. Several times now, one or two of maybe five or six files, all being downloaded simultaneously *to the same directory*, will abort with an error message "<filename> could not be saved because an unknown error occurred. Try saving to a different location". However, you don't get a chance to save it to a different location, the whole damned file has to be downloaded again from scratch. This is actually with IceWeasel 17.0.10, a thinly-disgusided version of Firefox 17 LTS, running on 64-bit Debian 7.1 multihome.
I realise this may be a plugin problem rather than a Firefox problem, I'm not sure of the exact relationship between the two, but I'm using TubeEnhancer 2.6 to do the downloads.
Whatever the 'unknown error' might be (and it's not a permissions problem, other videos being downloaded at the same time will save correctly to the same directory!) it seems beyond belief that it's not possible to give the user a chance to save the file somewhere else, as the error message suggests. It's so frustrsting to have to go through the whole download process again. Surely Firefox is storing a copy of the file on the hard drive as it downloads, is there really no way that this can at least be recovered when the error occurs, even if it's not possible for some reason to give the user a second chance to pick a directory and filename?
All Replies (5)
Could you possibly try disabling all the other youtube addons and see if those are causing the problem?
You can also consider to move to the Firefox 24.1.0 ESR version.
I'll try disabling the other addons, although I don't have that many installed. Watch this space.
As regards moving to 24.1.0 ESR, I'll leave that one for the moment, thanks. I like to try to stick with what's in the Debian repositories if I can, having had a hell of a time sorting out a library version incompatibility when I upgraded another program to the latest version from its home website, rather than waiting for the upgrade to find its way into the repositories.
OK, so I tried disabling the other addons and (I'm sure this is coincidental!) the problem actually got WORSE, not better, i.e. more aborted downloads.
This is a long-standing problem with both Firefox and Thunderbird, both programs will happily tell you *during* the download process that they've downloaded X MB of Y MB, but if the download aborts, then there's no indication that it's done so on the dowload page. All that is needed is to retain that expected download size figure when the download has terminated, so that you can easily see whether unattended downloads completed or not.
Yes, I suppose those of us who have to use satellite internet services are in the minority, but the only hours when I can download anything are between 0200 and 0700 my time, and I do like to get SOME sleep at nights!
Some more experimentation, should anybody still be interested. With all possible add-ons disabled (i.e. only the YouTube Stop Autoplay and Downloader still enabled) the maximum number of large files that you can download simultaneously without having a potential problem with early termination of the download is FIVE.
That, of course, is on my setup, 64-bit Debian, IceWeasel 17.0.10, satellite internet. YMMV.
Modified by brian