Freeware of the Moment- FireTune
I love Firefox, it's full-featured and I've added just the extensions I want. I will admit that Firefox can sometimes get a little slow, especially with complicated websites, and I've read numerous articles about tweaking the configuration file to get better performance. It can be a bit daunting, so I am very happy to present our Freeware of the Moment- FireTune. FireTune is a little application that uses one user selection to determine all the right settings to be changed. It's one-click simple and the speed difference in my Firefox browsing is simply amazing after running this once. Be sure and backup your configuration before running FireTune just in case, oh yes, there's a button for that too. Well worth the free price.
Nothing wrong with Firefox, but for my money Opera wins every time.
Opera combined with Privoxy... well, surfing Nirvana is here.
Posted by: cr0ft | September 04, 2007 at 06:07 AM
Is there a Mac version ? I can only see a Windows version.
Posted by: Nik | September 04, 2007 at 07:25 AM
I'm stumped. I don't know which XP version to get!
And are you SURE about this? The one time I tweaked Fox, I got bad results!!
Posted by: Mike Cane | September 04, 2007 at 08:47 AM
Well, for me it worked. And, yes, I think Firefox is faster now.
Posted by: Andreas | September 04, 2007 at 08:54 AM
Nik, looks like it's Windows only.
Mike, there's only one version of FireTune; it's at the bottom of the downloads. The other downloads are other products.
Posted by: Kevin C. Tofel | September 04, 2007 at 09:16 AM
That's why the config backup is such a good idea. It worked well for me but if it hadn't I could have used FireTune to roll back the changes.
Posted by: James Kendrick | September 04, 2007 at 09:29 AM
Haven't dug into what this does, but I'm presuming it's basically the same things you can do by typing in "about:config" in the address line of Firefox.
The biggest thing people have been doing to improve speed is to switch "network.http.pipelining" from false to true. It parallelizes accesses more, basically.
The rest is probably just tuning the amount of simultaneous connections and the amount of cache used, I'd guess.
Meaning there is no real need for this program as long as one is willing to spend a few minutes peeking at what is available to change at "about:config". One can also try "about:mozilla" for fun... :)
Posted by: cr0ft | September 04, 2007 at 10:45 AM