Superb add-on to speed-up Firefox
Ever wanted to tweak Firefox to make it superfast but don’t know how to? Fasterfox does it all for you in an excellent add-on.
Fasterfox is a simple add-on that allows dynamic speed increases via a prefetching mechanism. This speeds-up browsing by loading and caching all of the links on the page you are browsing in the background. This means that before you’ve even clicked on a link, Firefox has already loaded the page so it’s instantly ready for surfing.
However, there is a drawback to pre-fetching which is that it does consume considerable bandwidth. If you’re on a broadband connection on your own, this is no big deal but if you share a connection, or are working on a network connection, it may be a problem. If you’re worried about this, you should check out Fasterfox Lite which allows you to control pre-fetching in Firefox.
Fasterfox allows a high degree of tweaking to network and rendering settings such as simultaneous connections, pipelining, cache, DNS cache, and initial paint delay. There’s even a split-second page load timer which tests the effectiveness of your settings. Finally, there’s also a handy popup blocker included in Fasterfox to block Flash popups.
There’s very little to fault in Fasterfox. It may slightly increase the RAM usage of Firefox (like many add-ons) and consume bandwidth but the faster performance is definitely noticeable.
Dynamic speed increases can be obtained with Firefox’s unique pre-fetching mechanism, which recycles idle bandwidth by silently loading and caching all of the links on the page you are browsing.
Fasterfox allows you to tweak many network and rendering settings such as simultaneous connections, pipelining, cache, DNS cache, and initial paint delay. The program includes a millisecond accurate page load timer tests the effectiveness of your settings, along with a pop-up blocker for pop-ups initiated by Flash plug-ins.
By default, Firefox prefetches links which are explicitly marked by the web page designer to be prefetched. This is seldom done in practice, so you rarely benefit from it. Fasterfox’s “Enhanced Prefetching” causes all of the links on the page to be eligible for prefetching, which leads to a very noticeable difference in snappiness while surfing the web.
