I'm not sure what version you're running, but in the version of Safari I have on my Mac OS X system ("Version 4 Public Beta") it definitely does have the capability you're talking about.
Before we go there, though, readers may be wondering why might you want to be able to resume downloads?
The answer is in two words: big files. Yeah, when you're downloading 72Kbyte images or even 1.3MB PDF files, you probably don't need to be able to resume a download, but if you're getting larger files, like videos or even software, it's common to be requesting 50MB, 100MB or even larger files.
Heck, when I downloaded the release candidate for Microsoft Windows 7, the file was over 2GB. Even on a fast connection that's a multi-hour download!
When you have these huge files, it's quite possible that something will glitch or hiccup, causing you to end up with an interrupted download. Do you panic and start over? Hopefully not!!
This can also happen when you're on a laptop and start a download, not realizing it'll take a long time. A perfect opportunity to pause the download, go home, and finish up.
In all these cases both Safari and Firefox have your back, though I was surprised and disappointed that Microsoft's Internet Explorer 8 doesn't have this capability that I could find though it's possible that if you have a partial download and restart it the program resumes where it left off. By comparison, though, Safari and Firefox make it a lot easier to understand what's going on...
So here's a typical download in Safari:
To pause or stop it, click on the small "X" button to the right of the progress bar. Now you'll see that it's stopped and it'll show you how far you made it:
To resume, click on the circular arrow that's replaced the "x" button. Within a few seconds it'll reconnect and resume the download:
By contrast, Firefox does this slightly differently. Here's a download in progress:
To pause it, click on the little button with the two vertical bars. Now you'll see:
To resume the download, click the ">" play button and it'll resume. If you click on the "X" button instead, you'll find that you've cancelled the download:
To resume a cancelled download (which is a nice feature!) click on the circular arrow button (a la Safari).
Either way, when it resumes, you're back to the usual download progress window:
That should get you going and keep you resuming anything that's too darn big to download at once!
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wrong... it doesn't resume. It starts from the very beginning.