[stevegunn]

http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/index.html

a little faster too

[Martin Sambrook]

HI Steve,
whats so good about Firefox then, never used it myself but could be tempted to try it if its any good.

thanks
Martin

[stevegunn]

Its faster than IE you should try it

[Martin Sambrook]

Steve
would it be a problem using Firefox as i am on AOL which i think uses IE in its own program, as you can see i dont know a lot about the techy side of this

thanks
Martin

[stevegunn]

I'm not too clever at the techy stuff myself i don't think using aol with it would be a problem try asking mark r he is the internet wizard.

[ianharper]

Hi Martin

good program does the job, check out gmail.com next big thing in email, and Mozilla's thunderbird

[Mark Roberts]

Aol has just released a new browser based on firefox.

You can try it here.

http://browser.netscape.com/nsb/

Mark

[Martin Sambrook]

ok, thanks i will give it a go

martin

[Dynafoam]

I have been using the new version of Firefox for a week or so now and it does have some improvements over ver.1.

Though I shall continue to use it I would dispel the myth that it is faster than IE. What it does is to present screens in a different way - a large page will display the top section quicker, whilst loading the remainder. This is fine if you are going to read from the top. When I open certain files I want to read the most recent addition, which is at the bottom. With Firefox it takes slightly longer to load this than IE.

[Mark Roberts]

How do we speed up Firefox?

Here are two great tips for undergoing the process to speed up Firefox,


HTTP pipelining

1. Type "about:config" into the address bar and hit enter. Scroll down and look for the following entries:
network.http.pipelining
network.http.proxy.pipelining
network.http.pipelining.maxrequests
Normally the browser will make one request to a web page at a time. When you enable pipelining in Firefox it will make several request at once. It will really speeds up web page loading.

2. Edit the following entries as shown:
Set "network.http.pipelining" to "true"
Set "network.http.proxy.pipelining" to "true"
Set "network.http.pipelining.maxrequests" to some number like 25 or 30. This means it will make 25 or 30 requests at once (whichever you picked).

3. Lastly, right-click anywhere and select New-> Integer. Name it "nglayout.initialpaint.delay" and set its value to "0". This value is the amount of time the browser waits before it acts on information it receives.

Prefetch

This tweak changes how Windows loads Firefox. If you prefetch the application it will start much faster. Edit your Firefox shortcut to read:
' "C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe" /prefetch:1 '
That will prefetch the required .dlls and make Firefox load much faster each time you load it. Just make sure to keep that prefetch code in the shortcut and to run it once per-reset for the prefetching effect.

So why isn't pipelining on by default? What about that shortcut code?

Enabling pipelining in Firefox can speed up complex page retrievals, but it can also break Macromedia Flash presentations. This is a Macromedia thing not a Firefox thing but that's why the app defaults to pipelining disabled. There are reasons why Firefox isn't configured like that out of the box. Asa at Mozillazine.org explains why.

As for prefetching, Firefox takes up more RAM then Internet Explorer by default. But if you prefetch Firefox, Windows will keep Firefox in memory so it will load faster. But remember, you have to run Firefox at least once to prefetch it, then it is faster until you reboot again.

Cheers
Mark

[Glynn]

or just buy a Mac

[George-Reid]

I have had to stop using thunderbird because of complaints from those not using it. microsoft playing their game and wining again.

Cheers

George