Xdown: A Free All-in-One Download Tool

For readability, key terms link to the official site the first time they appear, and are marked in red afterward

Previously, memset0 recommended Motrix on their own blog. I’ll pad out a post too recommend a download tool as well: Xdown.

Getting it

Head to the official site for the latest version.

The developer provides a mirror optimized for mainland China.

Experience

Self-description: A free, ad-free hybrid of IDM and a Torrent client

That’s fairly accurate. Besides being free and ad-free, Torrent download speeds are excellent. The built-in trackers cover most common torrents. In a rough test, downloading popular torrents with Xdown after stripping their trackers succeeded almost every time (19 / 20). Overall success rate is roughly 50% (depends on your network environment).

As for downloading Torrents with uGet, whether it’s a configuration issue on my end or a software issue, the speed wasn’t great (uGet’s Torrent downloads are handled by calling aria2, the same as Motrix).

For http downloads, I still find uGet nicer to use. That’s mainly because Xdown’s interface is admittedly rather plain. (Of course, the Motrix that memset0 recommended is honestly the best of the bunch.)

For small files I usually just download directly in Chrome; for large files that need multi-threaded downloading, Xdown and IDM don’t differ much in speed. IDM really is a veteran download tool, but Xdown isn’t bad either. Given that IDM is paid software, I chose Xdown.

For Xdown’s browser extension, see the official documentation.

Install it from the Chrome Web Store. Configuration is fairly straightforward; here’s a testing procedure I copied over.

In Xdown, open Settings > Extension ID and enter the current extension’s ID; you need developer mode turned on to see it. For example: eapmjcdkdlenhkbanlgacimfibbbiinc After finding Xdown’s ID, save it and go to https://xdown.org/test.html. Click one of the links. If a new-task dialog pops up, the extension installed successfully; if not, carefully check against the instructions above. The two addresses below are demo installation videos; if you’re stuck, watching them may help. https://dl.xdown.org/mp4/xdown-extensions.mp4 https://youtu.be/J530yCsH9Xk

Recommendation

Some useful pirated / cracked software: http://183.91.54.237:7080/masuit/soft/tree/master

memset0: There’s a software licensing outfit that goes by the mocking nickname 司马马克丁, a curse-word twist on its real name 思杰马克丁, notorious for its aggressive anti-piracy crackdowns, so cracked versions of most software it represents basically can’t be found through search engines. This repository still has a few of them, though.