Fasterfox

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Fasterfox

Developed by	Tony Gentilcore
Latest release	2.0 / Oct 30, 2006
OS	Cross-platform
Genre	Mozilla extension
License	MPL 1.1
Website	fasterfox.mozdev.org

Mozilla Firefox (category)
Contents
Project history Features Market adoption
Origins and Lineage
Netscape Communications Corp. Netscape Navigator Netscape Communicator Mozilla Application Suite
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Fasterfox is a Mozilla Firefox extension that tweaks network connection and caches web pages in order to decrease page loading time.

1 Optimizations
- 1.1 Prefetching
- 1.2 Pop-Up Blocker
2 References
3 External links

[edit] Optimizations

An interface is provided to adjust a range of networks settings.^[1] 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.^[2] Users can disable this option. Fasterfox version 1.0.1 and later checks the robots.txt file on the root folder of servers to see whether or not it should prefetch the page.^[3]

[edit] Prefetched file types

Firefox can prefetch files with the following extensions:

[edit] Forced Prefetch controversy

Forcing link prefetching, or forcing links which are not specified as prefetchable, is a controversial feature, 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
unintended side effects when visiting a web site that ascribes actions to links (i.e. exposing a "Cancel" or "Delete" action via a link)
users may receive error messages in connection with pages which they are not actually viewing^[4]

[edit] Web spider

There is an additional issue with automated downloading:

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

As mentioned above, websites can use their robots.txt file to block Fasterfox's user agent from prefetching links to their documents (or to just some of their documents).^[3] Many websites do this in order to lower their bandwidth costs and improve responsiveness.^[5]