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Free Firefox Add-on Eliminates Waiting at Download Sites
You know the story: you go to RapidShare or dozens of similar sites and have to wait watching a stupid countdown timer before your download starts. Sure you can get what you want immediately by paying for the premium service but who wants to do that!
SkipScreen is a free Firefox add-on that solves the problem without costing you a cent. It uses a special GreaseMonkey script to simply bypass the countdown timers requirement for manual intervention. This means you can just get on with your work while the download takes place automatically.
According to the developer's site it currently works with:
* Rapidshare.com
* zShare.net
* MediaFire.com
* Megaupload.com (no captcha action... yet)
* Sharebee.com
* Depositfiles.com
* Sendspace.com
* Divshare.com
* Linkbucks.com
and the developer promises more will be added.
I tried it at RapidShare and it worked like a charm. I just clicked on a rapidshare file link and the file downloaded automatically when the countdown timer completed without me needing to do anything.
It's likely some website owners will fight back by using new techniques that defeat SkipScreen but the SkipScreen developer has committed to ongoing maintenance of the product so it may turn into a cat and mouse game.
In the interim, enjoy!
Thanks to regular contributor Lex Davidson for the suggestion.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/11243
This is a self-contained add-on and GreaseMonkey is not required.
Gizmo
Clarification: I've received an email from George Caratis, one of our site visitors, pointing out that SkipScreen works differently at different download sites. At some sites such as RapidShare, you have to wait for the countdown timer to finish before the download automatically starts while at others, the download starts immediately even while the timer is still counting down. In all cases it is important not to click any links as SkipScreen will do this for you. Clicking any links may in fact cause the automatic download to fail. Thanks George.
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Comments
Works fine Firefox 3.08 and I use some 57 Extensions, I love this plugin
This will not work with my Firefox 3.08 also. Upon installing it basically changed the interface as if I downloaded and installed for the first time. No bookmarks etc. I tried to relaunch and nothing worked. I finally had to uninstall the add on then reboot my computer to get back to my original set up.
There are other progs that do this but this is way more reputable, and so it hopefully will not quit working without notice like some have done before it.
Not compatible with Firefox 3.0.8
Works fine in Firefox 3.08 for me. You might have a conflict with another extension.
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