Firefox Tweak Guide

[Page 13] Neat Stuff & Conclusion



This section brings the guide to a conclusion, but not before providing a few more tips which may be of some help to you.



Speed Up Firefox Load Times


Firefox can be noticeably slower to load up the first time in each computing session compared with Internet Explorer. This is because Internet Explorer's core files are already loaded up with Windows at bootup. For the most part not much can be done about Firefox's load up time, aside from perhaps reducing the number of Add-ons you have installed. I don't consider it a big deal, but if you find it annoying, you might want to try Firefox Preloader, a program which attempts to preload portions of Firefox into memory at Windows startup so that Firefox is quicker to launch. Microsoft's own Windows Prefetch feature in XP, or Windows SuperFetch feature in Vista or 7 also tries to do this to some extent for all applications, but experiment to see if FFPreloader further improves Firefox load times on your machine.



Portable Firefox


If you want to use Firefox on other PCs, but don't want the hassle of installing it wherever you go, or you don't have permission to install it on other machines, or you just don't want to leave any personal data on other machines, then you can use Firefox Portable Edition. This application is the same as the full version of Firefox, however it has been reconfigured so that it works entirely from a portable device such as a USB flash drive, portable hard drive, iPod/MP3 player, etc. The way it does this is by disabling disk caching and relying entirely on RAM caching and storing all your personal information only on your portable device - it does not put any traces of your information on the drive(s) of the computer on which you use the portable application.



Firefox Prefetching


Google Prefetch


A feature introduced by Google and used by Firefox is called Google Prefetch. This is not the same as the application prefetching used by Windows (as mentioned further above) - this feature tries to load up what Google believes is the most likely page you will want to view as a result of certain Google searches you initiate. It does this in the background without informing you. You may notice your browser cache may have web elements (e.g. cookies) from pages you haven't visited yet - this may be because of Google Prefetch. A few websites may also use this prefetch feature to speed up loading of the 'Next'/'Previous' pages of an article for example. As such, it is not a "bad" feature, but I personally still prefer to disable it and maintain full control over what my browser loads up in the background. If you wish to disable this feature in Firefox, go to About:Config, find the network.prefetch-next setting and set it to False. This will improve security, but may slow down browsing, particularly in Google searches. The choice is up to you.


DNS Prefetch


Another form of prefetching which Firefox now does is to proactively seek out and resolve DNS results for web links and objects on a page in advance of a user clicking them. This is called DNS Prefetching and is once again designed to speed up browsing. Whenever Firefox encounters a web address, it needs to convert that text address into an IP number before it can use it. It does this by looking up the name and IP number through a DNS server. By using a small amount of bandwidth to resolve the IP addresses in advance, when a user eventually clicks on any one of them they will load up more quickly. There should be no real reason to disable this functionality as it will not breach your privacy in any significant way but will aid in improving browsing speeds. However if you wish to disable it in Firefox, go to About:Config, create a new network.dns.disablePrefetch setting and set it to True.


See the Advanced Tweaking section for details on how to use About:Config to change either of the above settings.



Google Customization


If you're interested in changing the appearance of Google Search, refer to this Quick Guide which details how to fix various potential annoyances such as removing the Google 'Everything' sidebar, disabling personalized search results, and stopping the fade-in effect.



View Source Code for Selected Portions of Web Pages


If you're interested in website design you may already regularly go to the View menu in Firefox and select 'Page Source' to see the source code for certain pages. This is a handy feature, but is common to most browsers. However Firefox takes this feature one step further: highlight only a portion of a web page with your mouse, then right-click on this highlighted selection and in the context menu select 'View Selection Source' - the source window will open and only show the coding related to the portion of the web page you've highlighted. This is very useful if you don't want to wade through large chunks of code just to see how a neat effect works on a page, or if you can't figure out which portion of code relates to which section.



I Need More Help With Firefox!


Unfortunately I can't provide tech support for this or any of my other guides, so please don't email me asking me for help or advice. In general all the information you need is right here in this guide, as long as you are patient and read it carefully, and supplement it with some thought and research. However if you still need more help you should check out the Official Firefox Support Site.


New to Firefox 3.6, if you want to undertake troubleshooting or seek help from others, go to the Help menu in Firefox and select the 'Troubleshooting Information' item. This screen presents a quick summary of the major components of Firefox which you have altered, including your installed plugins, extensions and modified preferences. If you wish to allow others to give you assistance, click the 'Copy all to clipboard' button and then paste the information into an email, forum post or document.



Conclusion


That brings this Firefox Tweak Guide to a close. I hope you've found the tips and tweaks herein useful and informative. Just like all my other tweak guides, I have made sure this guide remains updated based on user feedback and as new official versions of Firefox are released. It's already been significantly revised for Firefox 1.5, 2.0, 3.0, 3.5 and now for Firefox 3.6. To help me keep the guide as accurate as possible, please Email Me if you believe there are any errors or serious omissions in this guide. Once again though, please don't email me for personal tech support or tweaking advice.


Note that since the release of this guide in early 2005 I've had a fair few people email me telling me about all sorts of Firefox tweaking utilities. My opinion of these as always is that no software, however well designed, can tweak an application or game for you - it simply isn't possible. Most of the tweaks and tips require that you make an educated choice as to what suits your particular tastes, your hardware and the uses to which you will be putting Firefox. There is no "right" setting for every machine. While reading this guide may be tedious, I strongly suggest you actually take the time to read through it in detail because not only will you find out how to optimize Firefox, the information will also help you better troubleshoot problems and also take full advantage of all of Firefox's features.



Until next time, take care!