Fasterfox

Fasterfox
Original author(s) Tony Gentilcore
Developer(s) Rsccman Production
Initial release 2006
Stable release 3.9.7 / August 12, 2011
Development status Remaintained
Written in English , Multi
Operating system Currently all
Platform Cross-platform
Type Mozilla extension
License GNU General Public License, version 3.0
Website [ Fasterfox Download / https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/12878/ ]

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Contents
Origins and lineage

Fasterfox is a Mozilla Firefox extension that provides an interface to tweak some performance related settings such as browser network connection, cache, timings, as well as provide an optional controversial feature which forces Link prefetching. These changes can decrease (or if suboptimally set, increase) page loading time. Since 2007, the original extension is not maintained by the developer Tony Gentilcore and is not compatible with Firefox 3.0 or later. As of August 2008, there are alternative extensions that are compatible with Firefox 3.6, such as "Fasterfox" (Rsccman Production)

Contents

Optimizations

An interface is provided to adjust a range of networks settings.[1] This allows adjusting of:

Prefetching

With Fasterfox prefetching enabled, the browser will prefetch all links on a page in the background. Subsequently, if (or when) one or more of those links 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]

Prefetched file types

When enabled in Fasterfox, Firefox will prefetch all links with the following extensions:

but with the exception of those links it deems to be dynamic content by URL.

Forced prefetch controversy (Preset is Disabled for this reason)

Forcing link prefetching, or forcing links which are not explicitly specified as able to be prefetched, is a controversial feature, for several reasons:

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]

Pop-up blocker

Fasterfox also blocks pop-ups that appear as a results of Flash plug-ins (movies) and Flash exploits.

References

External links