Speed Download Editor's Review

Speed Download is a fully featured download manager.

The integration with the Mac Web browsers is quite good. It integrates itself with Safari without any effort. If you would like to use it with Firefox, then you need to use the FlashGot extension.

The management of the downloads is pretty good. It's a little slow when it begins the download, but after the mirror search and the download threads initialization, it works very good.

All downloads are stored in a predefined location on your hard drive. That location can be changed. You can check the 'Always prompt for download location' flag.

A good feature is Smart Folders. These folders contain files grouped together based on a search criteria. This works like a virtual folder feature and it won't group the files using the physical location. These folders are updated in real-time, meaning as soon as a new file is downloaded.

One of the best features is the integrated FTP client. This is a good thing because with this functionality this program is running for the 'Swiss Army Knife of the Download Managers' trophy. I like the fact that it has the support for FTP over SSL and the possibility to quickly upload something on your host.

As for the rest of the features that you need in a download manager, I can say that you can find everything you want from a program like this, in there. The cookie support is good and you can use this program when cookies are required.

Another great feature that you won't find very easily in a download manager is the integrated P2P support. You can share files between Speed Download users but that's not all. The traffic between the Speed Download users is encrypted so you won't have to worry about your security of your transfered data.

Pluses: it is a full featured download manager with built in tools that do a great job. These tools are the FTP client and the secure P2P file sharing between the Speed Download users. I might add that the preferences panel is very generous.

Drawbacks / flaws: this program is too good to be true so I tried to find something that is missing and I did. It doesn't have an option to do an MD5 hash check. You can hardly find an MD5 hash on a download site, but I had to write something here. There's one more thing, all this fun isn't free.

In conclusion: this is one of the best download managers that I have tested. It has very good features and their implementation is great.

version reviewed: 4.1.4