The ability to prioritize large file downloads

[Jonathan5733]

One thing that has started becoming a little problematic is Firefox downloading smaller files at faster bandwidth and larger files at slower bandwidth (in other words, prioritizing smaller file downloads). While that may be fine for some, I would like the opposite, as sometimes (actually most of the time) I need the larger files before I need the smaller files.

[Jon]

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[Anonymous]

@Jonathan5733@JonHi! How are you guys? I hope it helps... here's a good or bad idea: It would be interesting if we had the p2p protocol to download the files in part... This would be interesting for software or large files like iso. Usually linux distributions have a torrent file where you can download part of these files... The suggestion here is to give priority to large files... A suggestion I would like here would be... to use the torrent protocol so that we can download the large file in parts. .. if the big file is divided into small parts where each user collaborates with the complete part is a considerable idea to think about... but for that to happen it would be necessary for Mozilla Firefox to have native support for the p2p protocol. .. but the p2p protocol is bad... as many users use p2p for piracy... but it would be interesting to consider this possibility for users who do not have good internet connections and need to download iso or program files

[Gijs]

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@Jonathan5733 wrote:

Firefox downloading smaller files at faster bandwidth and larger files at slower bandwidth (in other words, prioritizing smaller file downloads).

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Hi. I'm a Firefox engineer. I'm not aware of any code deliberately trying to prioritize downloads like this. Can you provide more detailed steps to reproduce the problem you're seeing (what files you're downloading from where (so we can reproduce), how you're assessing download speed and how big the discrepancy is) and file a bug? Thank you.

[Jonathan5733]

@Gijs Shortly after you mentioned that you can't find any code in Firefox that could be causing this, my ISP suspected that the download sources are causing the problem (taking into account, the number of people downloading the file at the same time, the download host's speed, the number of people downloading other files from the same host, etc.) and that the issue is not caused by Firefox. However, I'm still going to say what I noticed.

I was downloading an Ubuntu 22.04 LTS ISO file (from ubuntu.com) and a Fedora 36 Beta Workstation ISO (from getfedora.org) simultaneously. In the downloads menu for Firefox, the progress bar showed the Ubuntu ISO (the larger one) downloading at an average speed of 6.4Mb/s, while Fedora was downloading at 33Mb/s on average (my router allows me to limit the upload/download speeds on each device connected, the system I was using was capped at 50Mb/s during this download). After the Fedora 36 image was downloaded, Ubuntu began downloading at a faster rate of around 27Mb/s. Both ISOs were being downloaded to the same location.

If my ISP is correct, it's not Firefox causing the smaller files to download at a faster speed. However, I would still want some way to prioritize larger downloads when possible (especially with fiber-optic internet) even if limitations cause that not to be the case.

[ava]

 I also have similar idea here Download scheduler for advance professional users - Mozilla Connect

I am from computer engineering background. So, I have used tech terms to explain idea. You can search for those terms to know more.

I hope it helps.

Thanks,