Fasterfox

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Fasterfox
Developer: Tony Gentilcore
Latest release: 2.0 / Oct 30, 2006
OS: Cross-platform
Use: Mozilla extension
License: MPL 1.1
Website: fasterfox.mozdev.org
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Fasterfox is a Mozilla Firefox extension that tweaks network connection and caches web pages in order to increase page loading speed.

Contents

[edit] Optimizations

An interface is provided to adjust a range of networks settings. This allows adjusting of:

[edit] Prefetching

Fasterfox has the ability to prefetch all links on a page in the background so that when a link is clicked, only a fraction of the time to load the page will be used, since the page has already been cached[citation needed]. From version 1.0.3 Fasterfox checks the robots.txt file on the root folder of servers to see whether or not it should prefetch the page.

[edit] Prefetching file types

Prefetched file extension types:

  • .gif
  • .htm
  • .html
  • .jpeg
  • .jpg
  • .pdf
  • .png
  • .text
  • .txt
  • .xml

[edit] Forced Prefetch controversy

Forcing link prefetching, or forcing links which are not specified as prefetchable, is a controversial feature [1] [2], for many reasons:

  • it is not standards compliant (even though prefetching in itself is a standard)
  • links that might never be viewed are downloaded - with consequences for site statistics
  • this additional traffic costs webmasters additional bandwidth (and therefore money).
  • advertising that is downloaded but not viewed might be morally or even legally problematic (see click fraud).
  • speculative downloading can actually cause cache pollution
  • dynamic content cannot be cached anyway

There is an additional issue with automated downloading:

[edit] Web spider

A tool that automatically downloads a set of links is considered a web spider.

  • to satisfy web spider standards, prefetching must at least honour the robots.txt file, which Fasterfox does.
  • a page with a large number of links may be problematic
  • links with large files may not be desirable

[edit] Blocking

It is possible to block Fasterfox from prefetching links to a specific a website. Many websites do this in order to prevent extra strain on their servers. [1] [2].

[edit] Pop-Up Blocker

Fasterfox also blocks pop-ups that appear as a results of Flash plug-ins.

[edit] External links

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org../../../f/a/s/Fasterfox.html"
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