Question:
Does Fasterfox Actually Increase Browsing Speed?
I've had Fasterfox (a Firefox extension) installed for two weeks now and I'm not sure if I can tell a difference... Does anyone else have this extension installed? Is it noticeably improving your actual browsing speed?
Just a bit curious as to whether this is having a positive, negative, or neutral effect on how quickly I can load pages...
Matt
Answer:
Re: Does Fasterfox Actually Increase Browsing Speed?
I moved this to Software since it relates better. :p
Well with FF1.5 I noticed a major improvement using Fasterfox. However I haven't tried it out with FF2.1 yet.
Tim
Answer:
Re: Does Fasterfox Actually Increase Browsing Speed?
Alright, thanks Tim.
Answer:
Re: Does Fasterfox Actually Increase Browsing Speed?
If you think about it, if it did improve your browsing speed, wouldn't they build it in? I can't see how running more software would speed anything up.
Answer:
Re: Does Fasterfox Actually Increase Browsing Speed?
Well, apparently, it makes several networking tweaks... I too have a feeling they weren't made originally for a reason... good point.
Matt
Answer:
Re: Does Fasterfox Actually Increase Browsing Speed?
There are bunch of tweaks one can do to their browser to speed it up. However what you tweak and what those settings should be depend on a lot of different things. Such as connection speed and cpu/hardware. The settings they enable by default are the best ones for a majority of the users and cause the least grief. However tweaking the settings for your specific setup will improve browser speed.
So the answer is it may improve and it may not. I believe fasterfox is designed with broadband connections and a powerful computer in mind.
Answer:
Re: Does Fasterfox Actually Increase Browsing Speed?
Your network speed and computer also plays a part in speeding up your web browsing experience.
Answer:
Re: Does Fasterfox Actually Increase Browsing Speed?
Mostly what it does is tweak a bunch of the caching and preloading settings in Firefox.
Such that it preloads every linked page from the one you're viewing into the cache. It does this while you are viewing the page, then when you click the link, it loads from cache on your machine instead of downloading it.
Answer:
Re: Does Fasterfox Actually Increase Browsing Speed?
It is frowned upon by some because of the increased load it places on web servers. Negative article about it here, http://benmetcalfe.com/blog/index.ph...nsions-go-bad/
All this extension does is makes multiple connections to webservers causing them higher server load(doing the same thing as enabling pipelining through chrome, which is also a bad idea), and unless the webserver uses per connection bandwidth throttling you don’t get any benefit from this, Eg. if your internet connection can download at 40 Kb/s and the website you are connecting to doesn’t throttle per connection you will have 1 connection to the server at 40 Kb/s, but with this you would have 2 connections at 20 Kb/s, or 4 at 10 Kb/s giving you no extra speed but four times the server load because the server has to keep track of four times the amount of connected clients. However almost all webservers limit the amount of connections per client, so the webservers anti-leech protection could end up banning your IP for making too many simultaneous connections.
I still use it with Enhanced Prefetching and Turbo Charged though. :) If you use the Courteous setting, there is no increased load to webservers, just rendering tweaks.
Answer:
Re: Does Fasterfox Actually Increase Browsing Speed?
Wow, thanks for the replies, guys. I think I'll leave it for now, but if I notice no additional speed, there's no reason to keep it on.
Thanks again,
Matt