On Downloading Files

It still amazes me why this has not gotten better. I had gotten used to presuming that there was a better ecosystem of tools that connected curl, wget or aria2c to the browser that I was incapable of finding. None of the extensions I've tried provide anything close to reliable performance.

The problem with using curl and wget directly is encountering websites that generate a one-time, non resumable link which they then communicate to the browser. In most of these cases, it requires a fair bit of reverse engineering and mocking requests to get the link in bash, in an unspoiled state so curl can download it.

The best option I've found at the moment is JDownloader2. It's been the most reliable downloader for complex files while being simple enough to use with its integrations.