Fasterfox is a controversial Firefox add-on mainly because of its prefetching setting that caused unnecessary load on web servers. By default Fasterfox was only using this techniques on webpages where the website developer explicitly enabled prefetching. Users could however change this to prefetch all static links. All ten static links of a website would be loaded even if the user would only click on one or none of them. This meant a huge bandwidth increase both for the user and web server.
Fasterfox Lite is Fasterfox without prefetching. The option is not available in the add-on’s interface. It does however come with the same set of options to speed up web browsing. It provides access to four presets and one custom setting.
The four presets range from default, which simply uses the standard Firefox settings, over optimized to turbo charged. The speed difference is visually noticeable. A timer can be enabled which displays the page loading time in the Firefox status bar. A right-click on the time provides access to clearing the Firefox Cache which is essential for testing purposes and to the options of the add-on to change the preset.
The Custom Preset adds five new tabs to the program’s interface that allow custom settings for speed related parameters in Firefox. The user can change cache, connections, pipelining and rendering options. Advanced users who do not want to install an add-on could simply open the Firefox configuration and set the parameters there for the same effect.
Related posts:
Mozilla Firefox About Protocol Links10 Essential Firefox Extensions for 1.5b2
Custom Firefox Startpage
Moving The Firefox Disk Cache To Another Drive
Edit Or Remove Firefox Menus
[...] Fasterfox Lite Comments (rss) | Respond | Ping | [...]
[...] Vía | gHacks [...]
[...] Fasterfox Lite is the exact same extension as the popular Fasterfox extension with one small difference: It removes the controversial link prefetching built into Fasterfox. Prefetching automated retrieves pages linked to on the current page so that they’ll load more quickly if and when you do click them, but it’s generally considered poor form because it wastes server bandwidth and adds to the server load. Fasterfox Lite does everything else Fasterfox does, and incidentally, it supports Firefox 3 while Fasterfox does not. [via] [...]