Boosting Mozilla Firefox's speed

 
     This post is continuation of one of my old post . Firefox lets us tweak it in a large number of ways and hence there is always a scope of your getting a better performance out of the browser. For eg, if you are contnuously online and if suppose you donot frequently visit same pages, you may limit the cache size on the disk or ram to reduce the memory usage of the browser to a lower value without much problems. Anyways, coming back to the post.
     Last time I talked about changing the disk and memory cache size of the browser.But, these are not of much use during offline viewing of pages. Certain pages having smart javascripts can make use of the offline caching facility of the browser to serve you better. To provide these with larger size, you just need to increase the size of browser.cache.offline.capacity to a larger value, 100000 in my case.
     It might happen that your browser may have browser.cache.offline.enable false i.e off. So you better turn it on!Just by double clicking it!
     You may also increase the value of image.cache.size Though I donot feel the need to do it. Also one thing should be taken care of. Providing large cache to Firefox will help to a certain extent. Beyond that it will only cause memory related issues.
   These were a few tweaks at the background level of the browser. There is another way to increase the speed also!  Just don't install add-ons without thinking. It may cause the browser to go slow.Also, it is recommended that you constantly update your browser and add-ons.
   There is a known issue with Java Console that while installing new versions, it forgets to remove the older ones so you will have to personally remove them.
   Will meet you soon with new updates, till then keep coding and stay tuned to the blog!
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Chrome A more developer friendly browser

                   I support Mozilla firefox a lot because it is an open-source web-browser. Not saying that it is not good but Chrome is also good. There are many factors where Chrome beats firefox as a better browser. One of those aspects is how easy it is for developers to create new add-ons. Lets face it, The features in built in a browser are never enough for us. Most of us are using some or the other add-on. Thus, making it easy for developers to make new applications makes your browser tick more because you don't know how imaginative/innovative the developers are.
                  Chrome beats Mozilla hands down in this aspect. Mozilla has several add-ons but Chrome has better(thanks to Google) and more in number. The second point is because of the number of developers.
This year, as a part of my ACM project I thought of making some cool Mozilla add-on as I had never used Chrome before.But, while going through the tutorial , I was unable to complete even the sample add-on. After trying for 2-3 times more I gave up on it and eventually moved on and made a windows mobile application.
In December 2010, Google launched the chrome web-store and had a big event. So, I thought of trying out the browser and Wow! how great the feeling was when I went to the link for the webstore. It was full of amazing extensions and so many of them! After using it for a month or so, I got curious and wanted to make one extension for myself. So i went to the google code page for tutorials and found it ridiculously easy compared to the Firefox tutorial(Again thanks to Google).
                I went through different examples and within a week I had my first application ready!Now I have made another simple extension for searching the same term in different search engines and believe me it was very easy to make.No fuss of making several folders for manifest , chrome and xul. Just one folder and you are set.
              I would request the Mozilla people to make the add-on making process a little easier for developers.


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2 changes I want in firefox 4

Last time i wrote about2 lesser known firefox add-ons. This time i will talk about 2 changes i want to see in the version 4.
I know that Firefox beta 12 is about to be released but these are very minor changes and can be done easily.

 The first and foremost is:"Making the Donot Track feature enabled by default"
Everyone is talking about firefox 4 having a donot track option for the sites but we don't know that the feature is by default disabled!
I would like to ask the firefox team that why have you kept the feature of this stature disabled by default. We all know how much we care about the default settings.Mozilla shouldn't think everyone will try and play with such technical aspects of browser.

  The second one is:"Keep Google as default search engine"

After using chrome for a month or so, i was used to writing everything in the omnibox(address bar) and when i typed in a search query, BOOM! bing search result! I was shocked and at first thought that it was because of some add-on but eventually came to know that Mozilla had changed the default search engine to Bing! Why Mozilla why?? Google is so reliable and loved!

I request Mozilla people to make these changes. Google is much better than Bing and unless don't track pages isn't made default, it will be unused and will fail to get the required acknowledgement.
Hope this page reaches to atleast one person who can do something
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2 lessser known firefox features

I assume that you all know what firefox is(u have to be highly ignorant for contrary!).
We all know that firefox and browsers in general are feature rich.Most of the useful ones are by default activated but I don't know why some aren't! I am writing about 2 of them in this post.

The first one is 'Search  as you type'
 For finding some text in browsers, we need to first press Ctrl+F and then type the text.
  Firefox has an inbuilt but by default deactivated feature to search without having to type Ctrl+F. Useful isn't it?
  You can activate it from:
 Tools → Options → Advanced → General → Search for text when I start typing
Here is the link for the Mozilla page on it


The other one is 'smooth Scrolling'
This feature might not produce a quite significant difference to the usefulness of firefox but gives an aesthetic feeling while using it.
As it's name suggests it will smooth the scrolling process to make it feel better. Though not productive it is worth a try and hence should be made a default setting
To turn it on try these steps:
Tools → Options → Advanced → General → 'Use Smooth Scrolling'
Hope you will like using the features.Will join you with more features soon.

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Boosting your browsing speed in Mozilla

you may be happy with the time it takes for a webpage to load in Mozilla but getting a better browsing speed is always a welcome change isn't it? Here is a simple way to boost your speed.
->Open a new tab and in the address-bar type: about:config
->Now in the box of filer type browser.cache
->Now turn the value ofbrowser.cache.disk.enable to false. It can be done by just double clicking it.
->Similarly set browser.cache.memory.enable to true.
->Now right click on an empty space select new->integer and give it name : browser.cache.memory.capacity and in the give it value100000 or 100Mb.

Mind you this will store the cache in main memmory and may take upto 100Mb of your RAM.So just take care of not giving some superficial value as capacity.Also, the process will increase the speed of cached pages only.Anyways, any betterment is welcome isn't it?

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Speed Dial on Firefox!

Chrome and Opera users will be aware of the speed dial feature so that you can save time by directly selecting the site of your choice from the speed-dial list.
But what about the firefox and internet explorer users? Okay we have, add-ons but why download add-ons if you can easily make a html code for that. I have attached a file below that contains the code.
The code is simple to understand and if you don't know what the target="_newtab"is that it opens the links in new tabs or new-windows as your browser interprets them. My Firefox 3.6.8 opens them in new tab while the Internet Explorer opens them in new window.But problem in Firefox is that if you have opened a tab by clicking on a link, clicking on a different link will open the link in the same tab as the previous and hence overwriting the already open link.On the other hand in Internet Explorer, the code makes the link to open in new window. I am trying to solve both the problems and will post an update ASAP.
Here is the link for the code.
After creating the code you must remember to rename the extension of the page to ' .html '(How else will it be a webpage!? ;) )Well to set the page as webpage as home-page you have to  do the following steps:

Firefox : Tools->Options and in the homepage box enter the location of the webpage
                             for e.g:file:///D:/html/homepage.html
                          Click on Save. Your home page will be displayed when you restart your browser.

Internet Explorer: Tools->Internet Options-> enter the location in the homepage section
                                                for e.g: file:///D:/html/homepage.html
                         Click on OK. Your home page will be displayed when you restart your browser.

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Firefox 4 beta review

Firefox 4's new beta (no.6) has been released and the firefox team has got enough time to correct all it's glitches.  Here is what i think about the new release:

The design seems to be inspired from Opera browser though the speed fails to inspire them.

For me the most important thing is the absence of support to save webpages as .mht format. Those of you who do not know the .mht format, it is a format of webpage where your entire webpage is saved as a single file and you donot need any other folder to contain the files.Isnt it intimidating?

A noticable feature is that of option to 'switch to tab using smart location bar'.
It is not a big deal or something  that forces you to download and install the new beta. It only notifies lets to switch to an already open tab having the same address that you want to visit.

A feature that is intelligent is the merger of the reload and stop buttons.
Now this is somehing smart as you are never going to reload a page before it's loading is  stopped. You have to give this to the mozilla team.

Apart from the above features, there is a support for WebM, new html5 tags, css3 though not completely flawless.

Firefox stresses on the hsts protocol support, this is what i got when i tried loading google using it! 

All in all, the design looks good but the responsiveness and speed of  firefox 3.6.8 is still better than 4
and lets hope to get a .mht file saving support in the later releases.

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