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

 

I moved this to Software since it relates better.

Well with FF1.5 I noticed a major improvement using Fasterfox. However I haven't tried it out with FF2.1 yet.
Tim

 

Alright, thanks Tim.

 

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.

 

Well, apparently, it makes several networking tweaks... I too have a feeling they weren't made originally for a reason... good point.

Matt

 

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.

 

Your network speed and computer also plays a part in speeding up your web browsing experience.

 

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.

 

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.php/2005/11/28/fasterfox-when-firefox-extensions-go-bad/

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.

 

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

 

I don't know if it does or not but I have it installed.

 

It caches future pages, the more you set it, the more pages it would cache.

It's like the old 56k.2 modems that did this.

Set it to much though, and you eat a sites servers for lunch.

Geenerally speaking, not a good idea to use it too much.

 

That's a great question. I know that pages get cached into the computer, so an image library is opened. But that's not how FasterFox works...it sneakily caches links that haven't been clicked. Supposedly the Turbo mode "hurts" servers...but I can't see how.

I'd be interested in benchmarks. That would be a great front page posting.

 

I think Fasterfox works extremely well on my notebook. I tried taking it off for awhile and noticed the pages loading slower, so I put it back on.

 

I like firetune better; a bunch of optimizations with none of the prefetching stuff. (it's a seperate program, not an extension, that just modifies the firefox config files; it's easily undone too)