Lately, I have witnessed people getting slow download speeds while downloading files on Google Chrome or Chromium OS based browsers. The affected users have a fast broadband connection (FFTH/DSL, 10 Mbps or above) but still the download rate does not go above few KiloBytes per second. This can be frustrating at times especially when you are working on a project/assignment.
One of the working solution of this problem is to use multi-threaded download accelerators like Internet Download Manager (IDM). Unfortunately, IDM is a paid software and does not have cross-platform integration.
In this article, I will show you a quick method through which you can achieve Download speeds similar to when downloading a file with IDM. You don’t need to tinker with the settings in Windows 10 or perform any advanced configurations in your WiFi Router.
How to Boost Download Speed in Google Chrome (Windows 10 / Ubuntu / mac OS / Android):
Step #1Â
Launch Chrome Browser or any other Chromium based browser (i.e. Brave Browser, Vivaldi) that you are currently using.
Step #2
Click the address bar and enter the following URL.
chrome://flags
Or if you are using Brave Browser, type the following:
brave://flags
It will open Chrome Experiments (configuration) page where you can change the advanced browser settings.
Step #3
Now from the search bar, type ‘parallel downloading‘ or you can directly enter the URL below.
chrome://flags/#enable-parallel-downloading
This will show a configuration with the following description:
Enable parallel downloading to accelerate download speed. – Mac, Windows, Linux, Chrome OS, Android
Step #4
Now open the drop-down menu of Parallel Downloading config, change it to Enabled.
Step #5
Chrome will ask you to re-launch the browser, click ‘RELAUNCH‘
Step#6
Download any file, for example Ubuntu 20.04 Desktop ISO file to check the new download speed.
What exactly did we do? How did it improve my download speed?
Normally, the modern day web-browsers are still lacking behind when it comes to downloading a file using multi-thread or multi-connections. In the above step-by-step tutorial, we forced Chrome Browser to use additional TCP connections to utilize the maximum possible throughput of your internet connection. These tweaks can also be applied in Mozilla Firefox on about:config page using Network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-server.
The reason these tweaks are not applied by default in web browser is to protect the health of Servers where internet apps and websites are hosted. Too much connections can cause network congestion by overloading the servers/network with DDoS like traffic, as well as ruining experience for other internet users at same time.
