Browser Extensions

Drag & dropping links onto Downie can be very tedious, which is why Downie includes browser extensions for all major browsers out there. Each extension provides several new features for the browser. Extensions can be installed from the Preferences.

Toolbar Button

When you install the browser extension, a button gets added into the browser’s toolbar that allows you to send the current page to Downie with a single click.

Note: Not all browsers need to automatically display the toolbar button - you may need to customize the browser’s toolbar and add the button manually. Please see your browser’s documentation.

Contextual Menu Item

When you right-click a link, you will get a menu item to send the link to Downie. Additionally, when you click wherever else on the webpage, you get menu items to send the current page to Downie with certain postprocessing enabled. This way can download some links as audio and some as video without modifying the global postprocessing settings.

Keyboard Shortcut

Alternatively, you can press Ctrl + Shift + D on a webpage to send it to Downie.

Safari Extension

Safari 10 (supported on macOS 10.11.6 or later) introduced native Safari Extensions. The extension is now bundled with Downie and doesn’t need to be installed or uninstalled. Instead of installing it from the Preferences, go to Safari and select Safari > Preferences… in the menu bar, select the Extensions tab and enable Downie Extension.

If you can’t find the extension on the list, please move Downie application from and back to the Applications folder and reboot your computer.

Privacy of Extensions

The extensions are very simple and do not perform any background processing. While the browsers can warn you that the browser extension may access sensitive information, the important word here is may. In order for the extension to access the link that you right-click on, the extension needs access to the DOM hierarchy which means access to the entire webpage content. If you are on a webpage with a sign in form, the extension could theoretically access this information.

Downie extensions, of course, do not do this. For complete transparency, Downie extensions are fully open-sourced and you can easily build your own copy and use that one if you do not trust the officially distributed extensions.