Faster web browsing!

[big_si]

Hi all,

I know that some of the rest of you are using Firefox instead of that nasty Microsoft product

A friend told me about this earlier today. I've tried it out and it dramatically speeds up web browsing! Thought I'd share it about and see if it was of use to any of you?

FASTERFOX

[Jay]

Not so good on forums as what it does is start to download additional pages behind the scenes from any links on the page. Apart from burning unnecessary bandwidth on YD, you'll be downloading a load of potentially useless information to your cache.

[Juz]

D'oh - just installed it before I saw Jay's post.

Juz

[String]

Fasterfox doesnt make things quicker unless you want another link on the same site. Useless for dynamic content like forums etc.

As others have said it basically hammers the web server downloading all it can find to cache in the background.

Thats NOT a good thing where most people are now on bandwidth capped connections - you could be in for a nasty shock.

[big_si]

A little knowledge is a dangerous thing

[Timbo]

Originally Posted by big_si

A little knowledge is a dangerous thing

Don' be put off buddy!!
Lots of yd'ers are using it and your mates right it runs rings around microsofts muck,
The tabbed browsing uses far less resource and it also keeps out the junk that would otherwise come down the line via explorer..
Read the reviews and make up your own mind,,

[String]

Its FasterFox he's on about here not Firefox itself.


(FWIW i use firefox, IE7 and opera).

[Timbo]

See what you mean,,does look like it could be a bit of a resource pig on the server side,,
I'm quite an advocate of the firefox browser,,it's certainly made my life easier over the past year or so...

Quote,,,
Users who are behind a firewall which monitors web surfing habits (such as users at work) should note that all links which are prefetched will appear to the firewall as though they were visited by you (even though they will not appear in your history file). These users may wish to disable prefetching by disabling prefetching in the "Fasterfox" tab.

This could cause some mischeif !!

[String]

Just dug out my notes (and yes im that sad) when i tested fasterfox.

On average for me instead of about 500k download off a typical website visit, fasterfox was background dragging 3mb.

This not only hammers servers who pay for bandwidth but a lot of people are on small caps with their isp - i can see that extended use of it causing 6x normal bandwidth could put them over their limit if they arent careful.

[Timbo]

Because some websites may not have the resources available to support the enhanced prefetching feature, it may be easily blocked by webmasters.

Prior to generating any prefetching requests, Fasterfox checks for a file named "robots.txt" in your site's root directory (subdirectories are not checked). If this file contains the following 2 lines, no prefetching requests will be made to your domain:

User-agent: Fasterfox
Disallow: /