HarborDrop 1.4 — Mac version

The current version tidies up the engine under the bonnet — nothing flashy, just keeping things solid so downloads stay reliable. It's the sort of tool you reach for when Safari or Chrome's built-in download list starts feeling a bit thin.

Splits stalled downloads into parallel segments

• Grabbing big files that tend to stall — it splits them into segments and pulls several bits at once.
• Anyone who has used Internet Download Manager on a PC and wants a macOS tool that does the same job.
• People who like things tidy. You can set it to sort downloads into folders by site domain or file type without lifting a finger.
• Tinkerers who want a download to trigger a Shell script or a bit of JavaScript when it's done.
• Keeping your desktop clear — it can pop open the file's folder in Finder automatically.

Extension covers Firefox, Edge, and Brave

• You'll need macOS 12 or later. Runs fine on Intel and Apple Silicon Macs.
• The browser extension that sends links straight to the app works with Firefox, Edge and Brave — not every browser under the sun, but a solid spread.
• The interface is plain and practical. It's a utility, not a media organiser.

Idles near zero on an M1 Mac mini

It's light on its feet. On an M1 Mac mini with 8 GB of RAM, it idles at next to nothing and barely nudges the CPU even with a couple of downloads chewing through six segments each. Memory use stayed under 120 MB in a typical session — small enough that you forget it's there.

Stability is solid. I've thrown 15 files at it in one go, queued them up over a coffee, and come back to a clean list of finished downloads. No beachballs, no silent failures. The segmented engine handles wobbly Wi‑Fi better than a browser left to its own devices — it picks up where it left off without drama.

That said, it doesn't do magic. If a server throttles you to a crawl, six segments won't invent speed. But on a decent connection — pulling an Ubuntu ISO or a large video file — you'll see the progress bar fill at a proper pace, often noticeably quicker than a single‑threaded download.

A video editor's morning

Freya cuts short films for local artists. Her mornings start with a pile of footage links shared via WeTransfer, Dropbox and the odd direct server link. Before HarborDrop, she'd babysit Safari's download list, swearing when a 4 GB clip failed at 92%. Now she queues everything through the browser extension with two clicks.

She's set the app to sort by file type: .mov and .mp4 files land in her Footage folder, while .zip project files go to Projects. Once a download finishes, a small AppleScript renames the file with today's date. By the time the kettle's boiled, she's already scrubbing through rushes in DaVinci Resolve — the app did the fetching and filing while she made tea.

Grabbing a full set of reference images

Say you're pulling together moodboard material from a photographer's archive page — dozens of high‑res JPEGs scattered across several sub‑pages. Doing that by hand is grim. Here's one way with HarborDrop:

1. Open the Site Grabber and paste the photographer's gallery URL.
2. Set the crawl depth to 1 — enough to reach the individual image pages without wandering off into the rest of the site.
3. Under filters, restrict to .jpg and .jpeg so you don't collect HTML cruft.
4. Hit go. The grabber collects the links and feeds them straight into the download queue.
5. While they download, you set the sort rule to site domain — everything lands in a single folder named after the site.
6. Once the last file finishes, tell HarborDrop to open the folder in Finder. Drag the whole lot into your moodboard app.

No right‑click‑and‑save repetition. No forgetting which folder you saved to. Just a clean batch, ready to use.

• macOS 12 or newer
• Works on Intel and Apple Silicon Macs
• No activation needed