Roll Your Own Firefox!

Do you use Firefox as your primary Internet browser? Would you like to get more out of it in order to make your Internet browsing easier and more productive? Then what you need are Firefox extensions! What are ‘extensions’ you say? Extensions are add-on for Firefox that can increase its functionality! If you are not using any plugins in your Firefox browser, you are missing out!

Click below to see what extensions I’m using and to find out where you can get your own!

Safari 4 Beta (or Why I Love Top Sites)

Let me start by saying that I have never really used Safari before. When I need to get online, I usually use Firefox 3 mostly because of its great stability. Mozilla’s browser has rarely ever crashed on me. After seeing some reviews and the browser test at Lifehacker I was convinced that I should at least try Safari out. After having used Safari 4 for a few days, I am impressed by the user experience but, being that it is a beta, it is not perfect yet. As far as my experience goes, Safari loaded up web pages about as fast as any other browser I’ve used. My favorite thing about the new version of Safari is the Top Sites page. If you have used Google’s Chrome browser, then you will recognize this page. When you open a new tab you will see this page that contains thumbnail images of your most frequently visited sites. By default it is set to show twelve of these thumbnails. The number of thumbnaiuls seen here can easily be increased to twenty-four or decreased to six. The Top Sites page even indicates when sites are updated or changed by placing a white star on the top right corner of the updated sites thumbnail. If you are like me and frequent the same sites all the time checking for updates, the Top Sites page in Safari 4 will be your new best friend online. However, since it is a beta, it does tend to hang while loading up certain pages. Also, I am writing this post in Firefox because Safari was having issues with WordPress’ media upload box. I’m sure these problems will be fixed in the full release of Safari 4. Even with these slight issues, the browser is still a pleasure to use and I reccommend everyone at least try it out.

Download Safari 4 Beta

How To: Speed Up Firefox

Last night I was exploring the Vistax64.com forums and found a post entitled “Firefox Speed Increase” with was described as a way to make the browser up to one billion times faster. At first I was a bit skeptical, but decided to check out the post anyways. Suffice it to say, the post was legit. There is not any third-party programs to download or even add-ons to install. All I had to do was modify a few values in the Firefox configuration file. Here’s how what I was instructed to do:

1. Open Firefox, enter about:config in the address awesome bar, click “I’ll be careful, I promise”
2. Set the value for Network.Http.Pipelining = True
3. Set the value for Network.Http.Proxy.Pipelining = True
4. Set the value for Network.Http.Pipelining.MaxRequest = x,

x can be any number up to 1,000,000,000 (1 Billion). However, you should not set it this high, as I will explain. This method works by sending pipeline requests to a sites host server and usings its bandwidth to load up in your browser. Normally, Firefox uses your own bandwidth to load up websites, which is inherently much slower. If you set the MaxRequest value too high, website administrators can easily ban you from their site for using too much of their bandwidth. That is why it much more appropraite to set x equal to lower number such as 300, which will not be a major hit on a websites bandwidth.

More Info: http://www.vistax64.com/tutorials/179887-firefox-speed-increase.html?filter[11]=Networking%20Internet