ECN Forum Forums General Topics of the Trade General Discussion Area firefox web browser

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

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]\