Reader Dwayne Norris has a problem with Dropbox links. He writes: A friend sent me a link to a movie file they’d like to share with me on Dropbox.

Video Tutorial How to download files in Dropbox with Internet Download Manager (IDM).

The link appears in this form: When I click on the link, Safari launches and the movie starts playing. I’d like to download the file directly but can’t find a way.

Free rapidshare downloads. Do you have any advice? Starting the week with one of this column’s shortest answers, I do indeed. There are a couple of ways to tackle this.

First, you can click the link, wait for your web browser to start loading the file, click in the location bar, hold down the Option key, and then press Return. The file will download. Alternatively you can append?dl=1 to the end of the link, so This will force your browser to download rather than preview the file.

You can make simple modifications to Dropbox links to share files the way you want. You can append the link URL to force the content to download or render in your browser. How to force a Dropbox link to download To force a browser to download the contents of a rather than display it, you can use dl=1 as a query parameter in your URL.

For example: Note: The original shared link URL may contain query string parameters already (for example, dl=0). App developers should be sure to properly parse the URL and add or modify parameters as needed.

The links may also redirect to *.dropbox.com/s/dl How to force render a file in a browser Some browsers aren't configured to correctly preview files. While certain file types can be downloaded instead of opened, others—like HTML—are not supported. To bypass the preview page and allow your browser to directly render your files, use raw=1 as a query parameter in your URL. Adding raw=1 to a URL will cause an HTTP redirect.

If you're an app developer using such a URL in your own code, please make sure your app can follow redirects. Note: Shared links don’t render HTML content in a web browser.

If you created a website that directly displays HTML content from your Dropbox, it won’t render in the browser. The HTML content itself remains in your Dropbox and can be shared. The links may also redirect to *.dropbox.com/s/raw.