The menu item Tools > Download Manager opens the Download Manager window where all the downloads (running, finished and pending) are listed. Selected downloads can be started, stopped/paused, deleted and configured using the contextual menu of the toolbar icons.
Downloads can be initiated through many different ways:
Using the menu item File > Download you can create a download manually. You can configure the URL and all of the download parameters yourself. If you control-click (right-click) on a link in a web page and select Download Link from the contextual menu you can also create a download for the linked file.
When clicking a link to a file which can't be displayed by iCab, it will be downloaded automatically.
If you hold down the Option key while clicking the link iCab will download the file immediately.
All of these parameters do have a default value which can be configured in the "Download" panel of the Preferences dialog. So in case you need certain default values for your downloads, you should configure these in the Preferences dialog first, so you don't need to modify these parameters for the individual downloads anymore.
The most important Parameter is the URL of the file that should be downloaded. The destination for the download is the location on your hard disk where the download is saved. Usually this is the "Downloads" folder on your disk.
In the Download dialog you can configure if iCab should only download a single file (which is the default) or if iCab should also download all files which are linked from the first file (for example to download a whole web site).
Use the Destination setting to either store all files as individual files in the downloads folder or by saving everything into a ZIP archive.
You can also set some limits like the number of files and the amount of data that will be downloaded at most, and the number of links that will be followed measured from the start page (the link depth). If you keep one of these fields empty, there's no limit for this option.
It's possible to tell iCab to load or not to load certain file types. Many common file types (images, video, audio files, etc.) can be directly checked/unchecked. iCab can distinguish between files that are embedded in the web page (like images which are directly displayed in the web page) or linked files.
You can also provide a comma-separated list of file extensions for files that must be downloaded (include extensions) or which must not be downloaded (exclude extensions).
The "Source" option defines where the files must be located in order to be downloaded. The files can either be located on the same "domain" as the start page, in the same "Folder" or these files can be located within the whole web (no limits).
And you can define domain names if you want to explicitly exclude files from these domains, or if you want to make sure that the files are only coming from certain domains.