Just downloaded the free firefox web browser from mozilla.
Seems to be faster than internet explorer.
Anybody else using this.
The pages on this sight seem to come up much faster.

Russ

I have been using it for a about 6 months now and I do like it.

It happens that I still use IE for the web forums as my spell checker program will not work in Fire fox. Fire fox also displays the page a little differently.

I do use it for almost all my other browsing and it is faster and IMO has better pop up control than IE.

Bob

http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/

I'm going to keep IE also, but I'll play around with FF to get use to it.

I think you will like it.

If I find a spell checker for firefox that works as well as IeSpell does in IE I would abandon IE altogether.

I am no fan of Microsoft.

Here is a tip to make Firefox even faster:

1.Type "about:config" into the address bar and hit return.
Scroll down and look for the following entries:
network.http.pipelining
network.http.proxy.pipelining
network.http.pipelining.maxrequests

Normally the browser will make one request to a web page at a
time. When you enable pipelining it will make several at once,
which really speeds up page loading.

2. Alter the entries as follows:
Set "network.http.pipelining" to "true"
Set "network.http.proxy.pipelining" to "true"
Set "network.http.pipelining.maxrequests" to some number like 30 or even 50 or so.
This means it will make 30 requests at once.

3. Lastly right-click anywhere and select New-> Integer. Name
it "nglayout.initialpaint.delay" and set its value to "0". This
value is the amount of time the browser waits before it acts
on information it receives. If you're using a broadband
connection you'll load pages MUCH faster now!

Also, there is a spell checker in Firefox extensions called Spellbound. I works well. What I really like about the browser is the tabbed browsing feature. It still doesn't work with a few things I need like on line banking and our corporate log in portal.

As I have said before do not try and un install IE. It is interwoven into the operating system and you will have all kinds of problems.

Nick I did as you said and it seems faster even on my dial up.

I also run a dial up accelerator program.

I will check into the spell check extension.

Bob

Nick,

Thank you

That "hint" to get > 30 concurrent connections is actually not such a smart move. The same text has been doing the rounds for a while now, but it doesn't mention that the limit was set to 4 as a means of rationing resources.

The connections on the server side are taken from a "pool", and if you have one client that grabs 30 of them, then the total number of concurrent users that the system can support will be seriously reduced.

In fact, 30 connections to a single client would be enough to lead many sysadmins to believe there was some kind of Denial-Of-Service Attack going on. They might or might not then take measures.

It could be a valid performance change to make if the browser was dedicated to a special intranet application and the appropriate server-side capacity calculations had been made, and if there was a guarantee that the browsers would not create connections to a public network.

I've been using Firefox for 3 months now, prior to that I was using the normal Mozilla suite.
I agree re: allowing more than 30 connections, this could well be bad for sites with slow servers, effectively locking other people out. The only other thing I have to add is that if you use firefox, for pity's sake back up your bookmarks file if you use bookmarks. On infrequent occasions, especially if it crashes, it may eat your bookmarks. The simplest way to do this is to copy the file bookmarks.htm from your mozilla folder to my documents, and if it does eat them, shut it down and copy it back:-)
By default in windows 2000 and XP it's in c:\documents and settings\[your username]\application data\mozilla\firefox\profiles\[random number]\

Nick, I just made the changes you suggested, except I went to only ten for maxrequests, out of respect for the reasons mentioned in responses. Nonetheless, wow!

By the way, for information to others, double-click on the item lines to change them.

I made the changes a few hours ago according to Nick's suggestions and I just went back and changed maxrequests to 4 because of the comments. I don't really understand the difference but out of concern for some poor slow server I did it anyway. The difference is dramatic and I have cable internet that pings like a T3. I can imagine it makes a slow connection almost exciting.

I disagree. If more people start using more efficient browsers (i.e., ones that are allowing many simultaneous connections), then the server sites will eventually upgrade their server software to support that usage. In other words, "Necessity is the mother of invention." Give them a necessity, they'll find a fix.

I have been using Mozilla or firefox for about two years now. On the computer I am using now, I think it is the only browser, as it runs Linux.

To SolarPowered:

You are gaining only false efficiency by tweaking that parameter for one thing, because the download speed is always determined by the slowest link in the connection from you to the host; this is not always the most direct path, and it is totally beyond your control. The link to your host is not necessarily as fast as your link to your ISP, even, and it will be shared between all those port 80 "connections" to your browser in any case, as well as all the other users, with additional overhead for each one. That is why, after a lot of testing and tuning, the default numbers were chosen: they provide optimal efficiency in most cases and avoid quite a bit of unprofitable overhead.

And for another reasoning error, the ability to over-ride them has existed ever since Netscape 3 and Internet Explorer 3. Early on in the days of those browsers, similar documents went around, and I'm tired of this again and again: for once, in MS's favour, the dratted parameter was stored in the registry so it was difficult to get at, and people stopped doing it.

So there is no sudden deployment of more efficient browsers.

The RFC for HTTP recommends not to overload servers, the same way the wiring codes tell us not to simply stick bigger fuses in when a circuit keeps overloading. Would you plug in a 16A electric heater into a 10A socket and say "Well, they will change all the wiring when I start doing this because necessity is the mother of invention?" Who is "they", in any case, and where are they getting the money from to pay for all these new servers? The software doesn't need changing. It is mostly upgrades to *hardware* needed to support more connections, and that costs a lot of money.

I surf the web using Safari. It rocks.

Have you got Tiger yet?

jooles, I apologize if my post came off a bit antagonistic. I come from a background of being one of four guys at Intel who developed the original Intel Network Architecture; the guy in the cubicle next to me literally wrote the Ethernet spec; I and one other guy implemented the first operating 10 megabit Ethernet; I wrote the operating system that ran the Intel Network Architecture.

I have a really, really good idea of what this stuff is capable of doing.

And I get really frustrated at how badly most of the stuff out there is implemented. I think that came through a bit in my previous post.

A couple bits of "low-hanging fruit" that could easily be addressed: 1) If they didn't design their web pages in the first place as a gazillion teeny-tiny objects that each require a separate connection to retrieve, this issue wouldn't even exist. They have complete control over that--if they consolidate their web pages into single objects, then browsers will only open a single connection. 2) Stop forking off new tasks for every connection. fork is a very expensive operation. Organize the system as server tasks that simply activate a record in a connection data structure to create a new connection.

Anyway, enough of my rant. I wish I had the time to bring a decent network operating system to market. The basic OS is actually pretty easy to do, but coming up with device drivers for all the different video controllers, network adapters, disk controllers, disk drives, printers, etc., out there is a massive undertaking. And expensive, since you have to own one of everything that exists in order to test it.

No antagonism at all; no problem.

Then does that mean that Bob Metcalf, who invented Ethernet at xerox before starting 3com, is working with you? That's cool. I thought the specification for the 10mbps baseband network became a general IEEE standard, 802.2, in the 1980s, but I'd forgotten that at one point there was the DEC/Intel/Xerox group offering a similar thing.

The mode of pre-existing sessions / connections you proposed is far more similar to the way the mainframe does it, and it is indeed a lot more efficient. The other thing one notices though is that the fork() call and its equivalents carry different overheads in different kernels or environments. Java and NT are pretty heavy, but most unix kernels seem to have a comparatively low overhead for starting a process.

At work we've all been told to read this article here, and find out more about this sort of thing from wherever we can with a view to the next phase of our project. (we will be delivering real-time streamed proofs of printers plates for approval etc before sending them to the plate-making machine, and of necessity at that point is is all 'tiny bits', as rendering it into colour-separated TIFFS does not occur till after the approval.
http://www.adaptivepath.com/publications/essays/archives/000385.php

It is using a similar approach to that which gives the remarkable new map application in Google its superb responsiveness, and does so *without* bringing the servers to their knees.

My favourite OSs for networks are OS390 and Solaris. Would you follow either of those designs, or do you prefer another design?

Nope, not yet.Currently running Panther. I probably won't until a hardware upgrade is required, but in that case if personal history repeats itself That will be a long time - first mac purchased was a mac classic in 1988. It still works fine but had only 4 meg memory, and 40 meg harddrive. Second mac was purchased 1993. Still works fine, but let one of my kids have it for school. This Imac purchased last year.

I agree with SolarPowered regarding "Necessity is the mother of invention." Thus the web server I am designing (a high performance application framework), actually detects excess connections and is capable of intentionally stalling, or even dropping, the excess (as specified by settings in the configuration).

But jooles is right. If you demand more than a reasonable fair share, the webmaster (or the server logic) can detect this and can do something about it. I've had to do this before, myself, and know some other people who have. I've also architected a 300+ web server farm that had to contend with these issues.

Web servers vary by capacity. I don't expect ECN to be anywhere near the capacity of EBAY, for example. Making 30 extra HTTP connections to EBAY may go unnoticed (and likely spread across 30 of the 100's of huge web servers they have). But on ECN and many other web sites, they probably all hit the same server.

HTTP 1.1 does support persistent connections allowing multiple requests per connection. When one is done, another can be sent over the same connection. Additionally, when there are more connections, there is more of a packet flood when they initially start flowing. That can result in short term congestion, some degree of packet loss that has to be restarted (after having used the bandwidth for no value), and possible congestion limiting flow control. A maximum of 4 connections is very reasonable for a website like ECN. I recommend not more than 8. If you see a significant difference between 4 and 8 across most web sites, you need to investigate other issues, such as your ISP losing a percentage of your packets.

SolarPowerd:

So why not take something that exists, like Linux (if GPL is OK for your project), or NetBSD (if GPL would not work for you), and put your own networking logic in there that can handle 100's of concurrent connections from 100's of concurrent users at the same time. Most of the drivers for most common PC devices are already done there for you (though I suppose you might want to tweak the network card drivers). Both have plenty of available applications, support X Windows, and can run Firefox, Apache, and many others.

jooles,

Bob Metcalf was of course at Xerox, invented Ethernet, and did or was highly involved with the implemention of the first 3 megabit Ethernet prototype at Xerox. Shortly thereafter the DIX or XID (take your pick) consortium was formed. I was part of the group at Intel. Bob Beach at Intel actually wrote the spec--that's his pseudo-Pascal defining the protocol that's still in the IEEE 802.3 spec to this day. I met Bob Metcalf, and worked with him a small bit in the DIX meetings. That was a quarter century ago (!!!); I don't think I'd recognize him if I saw him on the street today.

The first official standard was the DEC/Intel/Xerox "Blue Book." IEEE later picked it up and made an IEEE standard out of it. (Well, "picked it up" isn't quite how it happened; the politics involved were quite amazing, with IBM trying to kill off Ethernet because the official bussiness network standard had to be an IBM creation. Hence token ring...)

I don't really have a favorite OS, (other than the ones I've written ). I moved out of networking into other things over the years, and haven't spent much time looking over the various OS's out there. I do chip design now (I do happen to have a 10/100/1000 Ethernet IP core available ), and since all my tools run on Windows, I use Windows.

pdh, that's actually a really good idea. As you managed to read between the lines in my last post, a couple years ago I did embark on an effort to see what it would take to productize some of the OS/networking technology I have around. And as I said, I found that the scope of the driver support problem was just too, too big. I did look at whether there is a way to support either Windows or Linux device drivers in their native form, but one would have to clone a major portion of Windows or Linux to do that, which kind of defeats the purpose. I hadn't looked at grafting my stuff onto Linux. That might work, or it might not. At the moment, I'm deep into other things, but I might take a look at that if I move back in that direction.

jooles, that article looks quite interesting. I'll take a look at it when I have a bit more time. Thanks

--Solar




[This message has been edited by SolarPowered (edited 05-04-2005).]

Jools wrote "Well, they will change all the wiring when I start doing this because necessity is the mother of invention?"

Yes, as a matter of fact, that's how our electrical distribution systems have grown and evolved over the years. The need causes the evolution.

Yeah Russ,
I've been using Firefox for a wee while now.
Can't find much wrong with it and I find it a lot easier to use than IE6.
I like the fact that it has it's own Pop-up blocker "on-board".

Russ,
There is a thread down in the Computers and Internet Area, that I posted a while ago about the Firefox browser.
Here it is right here .

Thanks Trumpy:
Been so busy lately, I haven't had much time for the internet.
Between construction work, inspections and umpiring baseball games, it's pretty hectic.

Just the way I like it !