Speed up Download Process in Firefox with drag and drop ?

I discovered an interesting article at Lifehacker who themselves got it from Make Use Of. The article described a way to speed up the process before the download begins in Firefox. Instead of right-clicking the file and selecting Save As from the menu the author suggested to drag and drop the download link to the Download icon which would start the download immediately.

The download icon is probably not visible and has to be added using Customize. I have troubles following this reasoning however. I would like to point out that drag and drop is not working for all downloads. If downloads are managed by a php script for instance they can’t be dragged and dropped on the download icon which means that a user has to make sure that his download can be initiated this way.

My second complaint is that downloading files is much faster if you configure Firefox correctly. You can change the default action for all known file types in the Firefox configuration. Click on Tools > Options, select the Content tab there and click on the Manage button at the bottom of that menu.

You can choose to automatically save or open files. Last but not least we have download managers who also handle file downloads. You can configure them as well to automatically download files with a certain extension when left-clicking on those files in Firefox.

My conclusion is that this tip will most likely not speed up the download process at all if you have a properly configured Firefox browser.