A download manager for Safari on Mac

What Safari’s downloads list does

• A downloads list. Click Show Downloads near the top right of the window. Next to each item there are buttons to pause or resume it, and a magnifying glass that shows the file in Finder. The button only appears once there’s something in the list.
• Where files go. Downloads, or any folder you pick in Safari › Settings › General › File download location. Choose Ask for each download to pick every time.
• Downloading from a link. Option-click a link to download the file it points to, or Control-click it and choose Download Linked File.
• Tidying up. Safari removes items from the list after one day unless you change Remove download list items. It also unzips .zip files when they finish, and Apple’s guide says it removes an older copy when you download the same item again.

Where Safari runs out

• One connection per file. There’s no setting to split a download across several connections, which is what helps when a server limits how fast each one can go.
• No queue, schedule or speed limit. Safari has no settings for any of them, so big downloads simply share your connection with everything else.
• Resume depends on the server. Resuming means asking for “the rest of the file”, and servers don’t have to allow that. When one doesn’t, or the link has expired, Safari starts again from zero. What to try when Safari can’t resume.

Handing a Safari download to a download manager

Most download managers take over browser downloads through an extension. For Safari, few have one, so the reliable way is to give the app the link itself:

• Copy the link. Control-click the download link and choose Copy Link, then paste it into the app. Don’t click the link first, or Safari starts the download itself.
• Or drag it. Drag the link from the page onto the app’s window.
• Keep sign-in downloads in Safari. A copied link doesn’t bring Safari’s sign-in with it, so a download that needs you logged in, or a link that works only once, may fail in another app.

With Lynx, step by step

Lynx is the download manager we make. It has no Safari extension yet, so it doesn’t catch Safari’s downloads automatically. Here’s the hand-off:

1. In Safari, Control-click the download link and choose Copy Link.
2. Switch to Lynx. The link is waiting at the top of Home, Copied link … press Return to open it. Press Return, then Download.
3. Or drag the link from Safari onto the Lynx window. On macOS 14 or later you can also drop it onto the notch; that’s free.
4. Lynx splits the file across up to 32 connections and picks up where it stopped after a dropped connection, sleep or a restart, as long as the server allows it.

If you also use Chrome, Edge, Brave and Arc, the Lynx extension catches big downloads there automatically.

Download managers that plug into Safari

If you’d rather have Safari hand over downloads automatically, these Mac download managers say they work with it. Facts from each developer’s own site, checked September 28, 2026.

More apps, including free ones for Chrome and Firefox, are compared in the best download managers for Mac. Lynx and Folx side by side: a Folx alternative for Mac.