The file size in those cases is only displayed after the download has been started. That may not be a huge problem for users with 10 or more MBit and a Internet traffic flatrate, but users who have to pay per Megabyte downloaded may prefer to know how much they are downloading before they start.

The same may be true for users with slow Internet connections. Instead of downloading a file at the limit for some time, they might prefer to postpone the download to times where it can be downloaded without interrupting work.

Show File Size is a basic, but very helpful Firefox extension. The add-on integrates new information into the Save download windows of the browser. Here it displays the file size and type in a new row. This works well for many different file downloads. There may be situations where it cannot display the file size, but we have not encountered any during our tests.

show file size

With the additional information provided, the user can make the decision to download the file, or cancel it completely or for the time being.

Show File size is compatible with Firefox 3.6 to Firefox 4 versions. It is available for download at the official Mozilla Firefox Add-on repository.

Update: Show File Size has been discontinued. It is not available anymore. An alternative is the add-on Get File Size which can return the size of a remote file in the Firefox web browser.

Most do not offer unlimited bandwidth and those that do usually last not very long unless they add restrictions to their file hosting service. Save As is a new promising file hosting service that offers a simple interface and simple rules.

Everyone is allowed to upload files of any size. The process takes only a few seconds to initialize. All that needs to be done is to click on the select file button to open the file browser. Only one file can be selected and it might be a good idea to zip multiple files to upload them as an archive all at once.

A results page is displayed after the upload has finished. This page displays a direct link to the download, a link using the short url service bitly and several statistics about the upload.

The links pointing to the file are good for 24 hours. The file will be automatically deleted from the Save As servers after that time. There do not seem to be any download or user restrictions in that time period however.

The save as file dialog is usually offering a few file formats a document can be saved in. This limitation can be overridden by putting the name and file extension in quotation marks.

It is therefor possible to save information in different data formats even if they are not supported by the software program. It is even possible to select data formats that are not compatible at all with the data. A text document could be saved as an excel document or zip file. This will obviously throw an error when trying to open the file unless the right viewer is selected.