Ever been sitting around waiting for a download to finish, only to realise that it has been finished for quite some time? It’s much like having the phone conversation with a friend and panicking that you can’t find your phone. Silly, but if you download/speak on your phone often enough, these things tend to happen.

The latter is unfortunately something that no browser addon can prevent. The former, however, is very easily managed. Download Statusbar provides an extremely lightweight method of download management for those who download often enough that things tend to get confusing. The main positive – as opposed to the many download managers available for Firefox: it stays out of your way.

To get the addon, just follow the link at the bottom of this page and follow the prompts. Don’t forget, you’ll need to restart Firefox before it will be enabled.

In action, the large version looks something like this, depending on whether you’ve customized it.

Pretty small as it is, but those little downloads can get in the way when you’ve got more than a couple, and some valuable browser space is taken up. To switch to ‘mini mode’ instead, clicking the Downloads button, then options.

Then just click the little Mini Mode box.

And everything gets quite a bit smaller, even with several downloads displayed. They’re only shown when you click, by the way.

You can always switch back to full mode by clicking the Full Mode button, as long as you’ve enabled it in the options.

The advantage here is that Full Mode allows for a little more information if you hover over your downloads.

One feature to note is the ability to automatically scan downloaded files for viruses using your allocated virus scanner. Just click Options, head to the Virus Scan tab, and choose your Anti-Virus program.

And that’s the gist of the program. No real pretty pictures or anything, just bare bones functionalism. And anyone who uses their browser to download enough to warrant the use of such a program knows, you want nothing more than the essentials.

Install Download Statusbar