OMS SafeHarbor

I’m hard-pressed to find a software tool that I spend more time in than a web-browser. Given that at OMS we deploy our entitlement, software license management, and distribution tools in a SaaS environment, this makes sense. But even if we didn’t use web-browsers as the means to interact with our application logic, I’d guess that more than 50% of my time on my machine is spent working inside a browser.

For the vast majority of my daily transactions, browsers function outstandingly. However, when downloading large files (large is defined as 2.0GB or greater – for today – as the definition of “large file” changes fast in this business) web-browsers are imperfect, and sometimes limiting.

For example, Windows Internet Explorer has a 2GB download limit, the details of which can be found in the MS Knowledgebase article. In our experience, few users are aware of this limitation, or the work-around which can increase the downloadable image size to 4GB. Firefox does not have this specific limitation, but is also not the “perfect” download tool for large files.

Limits in approach and technology such as the IE 2GB limit, cause downloads to fail without a readily apparent reason (from the perspective of the end-user) and unfortunately, after already spending lots of time waiting for the download to complete. This maddens and frustrates both users and the companies who pay to distribute high-value digital assets electronically.

In an acknowledgement and response to these imperfections the software community has reacted by authoring alternatives. You can easily find both commercial and free 3rd party download tools to augment or replace the on-board download manager functionality in modern web-browsers. These tools provide end-users with many more options for managing downloads, and are able to avoid or outright replace the native browser technology used in the download function. Our friends at Sun (see the blogroll on this right of this page) and Akamai have gone so far as to develop and deploy their own proprietary download manager solutions to help their end-users complete downloads on the first attempt.

If you are routinely downloading large files you should be looking to use one of these many add-ons or applications(if you aren’t already). We’ll add a list of some of the download managers we use to this post in the next few days.

Next Installment: “Why Downloads Fail Part 3: The Math”