Tricks Firefox Download Panel, Change Height & Number Of Items

Download Panel Tweaks for Firefox is an extension that – as the name suggests – enables you to trim and adjust the browser’s download manager drop-down. If you’re a power user who needs to continuously download a horrendous amount of software countless times throughout the day, Download Panel Tweaks can makes things a little more convenient for you. The add-on increases the number of displayed downloading items, reduces the height of each entry, switches to a more concise time format, changes the panel’s style, and alters a few other things. Let’s find out more details about this handy little add-on’s working after the jump.

Download Panel Tweaks doesn’t take up toolbar space by adding another button, so you’ll have to access its settings page by opening Firefox’s Add-ons Manager and clicking the extension’s ‘Options’ button.

Normally, the download panel displays only two of your most recent downloads. To save you the inconvenience of having to open the download ‘Library’ window again and again, the extension enables you to view older downloads right from the panel; simply select the number of entries via ‘Max download items to display’. You can limit the panel’s vertical size by entering a CSS-based value in the ‘Maximum height of panel’ text field. If you plan on having a lot of entries on the panel, it’s a good idea to trim their height, too, by checking the ‘Reduce height of download rows’ checkbox.

The ‘Use alternate panel style’ option lets you touch up on the panel’s looks ever so lightly; this option isn’t selected by default. If you select ‘Fix button hover styling’, the action button on each download row won’t change unless your cursor is actually hovering over it; this option isn’t set on by default, either. To turn off the big green ‘download start/complete’ arrow, check ‘Disable alert arrow’. The Ctrl+J hotkey normally opens up the download ‘Library’ window; to reconfigure the shortcut for the download panel instead, select the ‘Ctrl+J toggles panel’ checkbox.
The amount of time left before a download completes is represented in the ‘xx minutes and xx seconds’ format by default. To change it to the more concise ‘mm:ss’ or ‘hh:mm:ss’ format, you can select from the ‘Time format’ drop-down menu.
Download Panel Tweaks does one final thing to make the download panel a little bit more useful. The extension tweaks the status line (below the download bar) to include download speed information (measured in kB/s), as you can see in the screenshot above.

Get Download Panel Tweaks for Firefox