Download Managers were a product of the dial-up networking era, They were programs that let a user pause a long download midsession and pick up where he left off later, even if he hung up and dialed back in again, a user came to appreciate such tools after being disconnected in the middle of a long download-when downloading a single 5MB file could take 20 to 30 minutes.

and today with broadband almost everywhere, download managers might seem less relevant, it's today. but how about the next five or seven years and we know that high-speed networks are spreading around the world and there speed is increasing at the same time, I think that we have to prepare the funeral of most download managers like DAP, FlashGet, Getright,.. because with a speed of 10mbps it's a silly to use a download manager.

Granted, for a broadband user such as myself, download managers like DownthemALL might not have as much use as they did when we were on dial-up, but they do still have some use. I appreciate any increase in speed because it means I have more free time.

With increased connection speeds and offers of "unlimited bandwidth", come the want to download larger files that might take a significant amount of time. Again, a download manger would be helpful but not necessary.

However, on the whole I agree with you. I have a 2MB/s connection with download speeds of ~130KB/s. In order for a download to take an hour, the file would need to be ~460MB and that's nearly 1/4 of my monthly download limit. How often would you download something like that? Extremely rarely.

As I see it, they won't go but just become a luxury as opposed to a necessity.

Once I got off dial-up, I stopped using download managers. There's really no reason to bother. I don't download all that much stuff anyway - and most of it's so small that, if the download is killed halfway through, starting all over again doesn't really take all that long (a couple of minutes at the most, usually).

Back in the day, though, GetRight was a lifesaver. Even though I had a 56k modem, I was fortunate to connect at 28k because of my ancient telephone lines (the ones coming to my house - the ones inside the house are new).

i'm still tied up to a dial-up, since it is the most cost-efficient option for me (compared to other accessible options i can choose from, like cable, DSL, and WI-FI). and download managers play a major part in my online life as it is. it's not so much the ability to resume disconnected downloads for me (though it's a major plus), but the ability to queue my downloads as long as i want. i always maintain a long list of downloads (like youtube videos ), which i activate when i go idle from time to time, like this time, when i'm taking the time to a reply to a thread here on trap17. i do this so as to maximize the connection that i have, slow as it is. when i'm ready to submit a post, i deactivate my download manager again, back and forth and so on day in and day out.

given the luxury of high-speed broadband connection, i'd still be using a download manager, just without the on-off routine i have today. i'd be simply having it running in the background, with all the multi-tasking stuff i do online: chat/IM, email, forums, googling, etc. besides i have a 120-GB HD to fill (and that's just one of two i have connected on my system right now) lolz

and don't strike out download managers in the near future either. here's why:

Yea I agree I barely use download managers anymore, The only thing I use them for is large files because my computer tends to restart itself alot and this lets me pick up where I left off.

Back in the days of Dial up I was fan of GetRight, I still remember the time it was free. But today....speed is what mattest most, and wifi is what connects you from anywhere with access point nearby. And from what I've seen 3 weeks ago FlashGet accellerated a download like nothing I've seen before...and trust me...I've seen a lot of speeds....this was a rocker. For my pptp internet I prefer LeechGet ... this thing got me speeds far beyond anything imaginable....but still...for WiFi I am going to use FlashGet From now on...and besides download managers give you a good way to trach what, where from, when and where to you have downloaded.

If you have slower broadband then there still a need for them cause if you have to give up your comptuer to somebody else or something, then you can pause it and resume later, or it still makes downlaods faster lol.

I personally never have used a download manager even when i had dialup internet. I found no point in it because unless i was downloading a OS like Linux, the files were not big enough or it was going through P2P network in which it was like using a download manager.

Back in my modem days (which were not so long ago, maybe 7 months ago), I used GetRight for my downloads... Most of the time, files I downloaded were small, not exceeding 1MB, and as I was connected at speeds of 50.6 or 52.0 kbps, so I usualy got around 5 kBps download speed... Only when I wanted to download a bunch of files, I would use GetRight, to que my downloads, or if I downloaded some software or oher big things...

Now that I'm on ADSL (256/64 kbps), I don't even have any donwload managers installed, just the one that's built-in into Firefox Depending on the server, I can get speds up to full 32kB/s, which is enough for me, as I don't need anything big downloaded in 2 minutes

Besides, my computer has been up for almost 40 days (you can check this on my "Online Status" page), without restart, as well as my internet connection, so... Yeah, I'm a geek,i know

Anyways, I suppose there will be still some use for download managers, for some people, but as fas as I see, most of the people are abandoning the whole download manager stuff...