Out of all my computers, the only computer that uses Chrome as the default browser is my laptop. My work and home PC both use Firefox as default, but my usage is still 95% Chrome vs Firefox. The only reason I kept Firefox as default was a silly set of reasons. One, it’s slightly easier to add a bookmark and manage it in the side panel for me. And two, Free Download Manager works natively in Firefox.

Long long ago when I used dial up, download accelerators were kind of all the rage. It would basically do magic by which you could get to fully saturate your downstream. Now, modern accelerators work by making multiple connections to a server to download a file in pieces by which you can fully utilize your download speed. Once you get used to this you’re hooked. For me personally, most of the non-accelerated speeds for downloads are maybe like 200-500KB/s. After I started using FDM though they always download at 1.2MB/s which is my full download speed.

Now the problem with switching to Chrome was that FDM had poor support for Chrome. So I was sort of stuck between browsers if I wanted to do any heavy downloading. Now though, I finally found a plugin for Chrome to help out, Download Assistant.

The reason for the post though is that it seems like it’s tricky to setup for whatever reason, or maybe just tricky for me since I was going the upgrade path. So here’s how I had to do it.

1. Get/install Chrome
2. Get/install FDM
3. In FDM go to Options -> Settings -> Monitoring
4. Check Google Chrome
5. Get Download Assistant
6. In Chrome go to Tools -> Extensions -> Download Assistant Options
7. Set FDM as the download manager and hit save and close
8. Close both Chrome AND FDM. By close I mean exit the program.
9. Restart FDM

Ok at this point FDM will start intercepting downloads from Chrome, making it pretty much the greatest thing ever. If you’ve never used FDM you’ll probably want to check out all the options and other settings because it’s pretty neat on it’s own.