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How do you resume an interrupted download in Apple Safari?

Dave, you've said in a different article (see Download managers that allow resumption of interrupted downloads) that Apple's Safari browser has that as an option for its download manager. Just right-click on an interrupted download in the "Download Window". I'm a bit confused, because I have Safari on a Mac with OSX tiger. When I control-click there is NO option in the window to resume download. Please clarify as you said Safari can do this. How can i resume an interrupted download?


Dave's Answer:

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:

safari download in progress

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:

safari download stopped

To resume, click on the circular arrow that's replaced the "x" button. Within a few seconds it'll reconnect and resume the download:

safari download resumed

By contrast, Firefox does this slightly differently. Here's a download in progress:

firefox download in progress

To pause it, click on the little button with the two vertical bars. Now you'll see:

firefox download paused

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:

firefox download cancelled

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:

firefox download resumed

That should get you going and keep you resuming anything that's too darn big to download at once!



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Comments

wrong... it doesn't resume. It starts from the very beginning.

Posted by: Robert Lozano at June 12, 2009 5:14 AM

Robert Lozano is correct. Every time I've clicked on the circular arrow, it's started back at square one. I'm running 10.4.11.

Posted by: William F. Brabenec at July 18, 2009 7:44 AM

Yeah! If i click on the resume button for mac, it starts over again.
How can I resume the download? Any other way?

Posted by: Son at October 23, 2009 1:07 AM

I've seen the same behavior lately in Safari too, which makes me wonder if I was hallucinating when I thought it was restarting an existing download rather than starting over. :-( I do not know of any way that you can have resumable downloads from within Safari now...

Posted by: Dave Taylor at October 26, 2009 10:15 AM

I have something to say, now that you mention it, but ...
Starbucks coffee cup I do have a lot to say, and questions of my own for that matter, but first I'd like to say thank you for all your efforts on this Web site by buying you a cup of coffee!

I do have a comment, now that you mention it!











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