(Not to be confused with topic WebBrowserMissingWidgetWorkArounds. Notice "Widget" versus "Wget".)

Sometimes, the web browser is missing something that is in wget, and this leads to horrendous work-arounds.

First and most obvious example: most web browsers cannot resume an interrupted download where it left off. Really annoying for that 100 megabyte file over dialup, or that 4gb DVD ISO over an even slightly flaky DSL. Any UNIX wizard worth his salt these days would fire up wget (which retries and use wget -c to resume if the retry fails) to get the file. The user's browser can't do that. So what do commercial sites that provide large binaries do: they provide a grappling-hook style .exe that pulls the large file, resuming as needed. This conveniently solves the problem for most users, but what's your UNIX user to do if he needs the large file (they probably provide no link to the real file)?

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Slightly offtopic, but do those auto-download things ever annoy you when your intent is to copy the url and paste it into an xterm ssh'd into a remote machine that wants the file (will use wget to retrieve url)?

''Yes, they're *intensely* annoying, especially since many of them require some kind of negotiation with a browser such that wget fails, so I need to use a command line browser such as Lynx to do the download.''

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When I run into such a site I just take the hint that this company and its products are useless to me and look elsewhere  -AnonymousDonor