The extension takes care not only of the network side of things but also of the browsing side. This means that you will get faster downloads plus a selection of productivity tweaks.

Downloads are accelerated thanks to several configuration tweaks that are applied automatically during installation.

The productivity and browsing enhancements require more explanation. On the productivity side, there are lots of smaller additions and tweaks that make life more comfortable. Most of the options are displayed under the General tab in the options.

Here is a list of features that can be enabled under General:

• Linkify text urls – This turns plain text urls into clickable links in the browser
• Add related articles to Wikipedia – Displays related articles on Wikipedia. I could not get this to work in Firefox.
• Enhance Awesomebar – No idea
• Show context menu additions – adds new options to the right-click context menu, for instance to download all images from a page.
• Enable Endless Page – Loads the next page and adds it at the end of the current one.
• Auto copy selected – Copies selected text automatically to the clipboard
• Paste on middle mouse click – Paste clipboard contents on middle mouse click
• Paste on right mouse click – Same as above, only on right-click.

The Search Results tab lists enhancement that can improve the way search results are displayed in the browser. This ranges from showing related search results, adding search refinements at the top to adding other search engine links in the results.

Qlauncher is an on-page search form that can be used to search popular search engines and other sites directly without leaving the current page. The search supports a variety of sites from Wikipedia and YouTube to Amazon, ReadWriteWeb and Lifehacker. Even the now defunct Download Squad is still in the add-ons listing. It is however possible to remove sites from the default listing and add new sites to the list. Just open the site that you want to add in the browser, press Ctrl-Space to open the Qlauncher interface and click the + icon next to the site to add it to the search.

The final option provided by FastestFox is a feature called Popup Bubble. The extension displays the popup whenever text is selected by the user. The popup may offer word definitions or display links to search for the term on Bing, Twitter, IMDB, YouTube and several other properties.

The Google Chrome pendant, FastestChrome is not offering all the options that the Firefox add-on offers. It supports the popup bubble, search results integration and a handful of the features of the add-ons General tab.

Firefox users can download and install FastestFox from the official Mozilla Firefox add-on repository. Chrome users the Chrome extension from the Chrome web store.

Firefox Preloader is a new add-on for the web browser that promises faster load times for Windows environments. Setup is a little bit complicated, as it involves the creation of a program shortcut, adding a command line parameter to that shortcut and adding the new shortcut to the Windows autostart.

Here is how this is done in detail:

Start with the installation of the Firefox Preloader add-on at the official Mozilla Firefox add-on repository. Once you have done that you can close the browser.

Open the default Firefox installation folder on the operating system. This is C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox on Windows (64-bit users open C:\Program Files (x86)\Mozilla Firefox instead).

Right-click the firefox.exe file and select Create Shortcut. You may need to create the shortcut on the desktop.

Right-click the shortcut and select Properties from the context menu.

Locate the Target field and append the command line argument -preloader at the end.

Click OK to save the changes. All that is left to do now is to add the Firefox Preloader to the Windows Autostart. This can be done by dragging and dropping the shortcut to the Startup folder of the Start Menu. You can alternatively open the folder C:\Users\username\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\Startup and move or drag the file in there.

The program preloads Firefox during system startup. This means that the system start will take a bit longer, and that the start of the browser on the system will be faster. Some users who commented on the Mozilla site stated that the add-on significantly improved the start time of the browser. One user mentioned that load times dropped from 25-30 seconds to 4-5 seconds, another that the loading time dropped from 10 seconds to 4-5 seconds.

It appears that users with lots of add-ons installed will benefit the most from the preloader.

How fast is your version of Firefox starting up? Let me know in the comments.

QuickDrag, as the name implies, adds drag and drop to the browser to speed some of the actions. To be precise, it can speed up saving images on a page, loading urls and performing searches.

To save an image, the user would simply drag it a bit around, and the same operation is used to perform a search for highlighted text that gets dragged and website links.

Those three drag and drop operations are the standard features offered by the Firefox add-on. These are refined with hotkeys that need to be activated during the drag and drop process.

To open an image in a new tab, instead of saving it, a user would hold down the CTRL key while dragging and dropping the image. Urls, that are usually opened in a new tab when dragged can also be saved to the local computer by holding down ALT while dragging them on the page.

quickdrag

The settings of the add-on contain additional options. Here it is possible to select if tabs for web addresses and text searches should be opened in the foreground as opposed to being opened in the background which is the default setting. It is furthermore possible to make clickable links open in new tabs as well instead of providing search and save functionality. Clickable links by default can be opened in new tabs by middle-clicking. That’s why the program offers to search or save them only by default.

Finally, there is an option to disable the downloading of images when they are dragged. This in turn will open them in a new tab instead.

QuickDrag can speed up some actions in the Firefox web browser. It is best suited for Firefox users who often perform those while working in the browser.

We already covered several methods to regularly optimize the Firefox databases. Some options included the Firefox add-on Vacuum Places which is able to optimize the databases automatically and manually.

Some users on the other hand might prefer a third party tool for the process. That’s where Speedyfox comes into play. The program is offered both as a setup and portable version at the developer’s website.

It will perform the same operation that the Vacuum Places add-on performs to optimize the Firefox databases. There are however a few differences. SpeedyFox is currently only available for the Windows operating system. It will automatically detect the default Firefox profile and offer to optimize its databases. It is possible to change to other existing Firefox profiles or to select a custom location which is very handy for portable versions of Firefox and those that are not registered in the operating system.

SpeedyFox is available at the developer’s website. A version for computer systems running the Mac operating system is in the making.

Some users, especially those with the Google Toolbar installed, experienced a huge history database that had a size of several hundreds Megabytes. A good way of speeding up the Firefox web browser is to limit the history that it records.

Most users know that it is possible to change the minimum days the history is stored in the Firefox options. What only a few know is that there are additional settings in the about:config dialog that make it possible to change the hard limit and the maximum days a website is kept in the history.

To speed up Firefox by limiting the history do the following: Open a new web browser tab and load the page [about:config]. Now filter for the term [browser.history] and locate the following three parameters:

• browser.history_expire_days: The maximum days that Firefox stores websites in the history database. (default 180)
• browser.history_expire_days_min: The minimum days that Firefox stores websites in the history database (default 90)
• browser.history_expire_sites: Defines the hard limit (that is the maximum) of websites that are stored in the Firefox history. Reducing the amount from 40000 to a lower value can help a lot.

Reducing both the minimum and maximum values to a lower number can improve the performance of the web browser especially during startup. There are no perfect values which means that the user has to experiment a bit to find the values best suited for the browsing situation. Suggested values are 7,14,28 or 56 days for both settings. Users who want to get rid of the history completely need to use 0 as the value in both parameters.

Restarting the web browser after changing the parameters should get rid of the websites that exceed the maximum that has been set by the user. It might be needed to optimize the SQLite database after the procedure to ensure that the database is not fragmented because of this change.