Puneet Varma (Editor)

Fasterfox

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Original author(s)
  
Tony Gentilcore

Initial release
  
2006

Written in
  
English

Developer(s)
  
RsCcman Production

Development status
  
Re maintained

Stable release
  
3.9.85 / January 11, 2014; 3 years ago (2014-01-11)

Fasterfox is a Mozilla Firefox extension that provides an interface for tweaking some performance related settings, such as browser network connection, cache, and timings. The extension also provides an optional controversial feature which forces link prefetching.

Contents

The original extension has not been maintained by the original developer Tony Gentilcore since 2007, and is not compatible with Firefox 3.0 or later. However, there are alternative extensions that are compatible with the latest versions of Firefox. As of August 2008, rights to the extension were sold to (Rsccman Production) "Fasterfox", who have implemented support for newer Firefox releases.

Optimizations

An interface is provided to adjust a range of networks settings. This allows adjusting of:

  • HTTP pipelining
  • Memory caching
  • Diskcaching
  • DNS caching
  • FastBack caching

    • Prefetching

    With Fasterfox prefetching enabled, the browser will prefetch all links on a page in the background. Subsequently, if (or when) one or more of those links is clicked, only a fraction of the time to load the page will be used, since the page has already been cached; users can disable this option. Fasterfox version 1.0.1 and later checks the robots.txt file on the root folder of servers to see whether or not it should prefetch the page.

    Prefetched file types

    When enabled in Fasterfox, Firefox will prefetch all links with the following extensions (it deems other things to be dynamic content by URL):

  • .gif
  • .htm and .html
  • .jpg and .jpeg
  • .pdf
  • .png
  • .txt and .text
  • .xml

    • Forced prefetch controversy

    Forcing link prefetching, or forcing links which are not explicitly specified as able to be prefetched, is a controversial feature, for several reasons (as a result, the preset is disabled):

  • prefetched links that are never subsequently viewed are downloaded
  • with consequences for site statistics
  • which can actually slow down browsing due to cache pollution
  • this additional traffic may cost both webmasters and user additional bandwidth (and therefore money).
  • prefetched advertising might be morally or even legally problematic - see click fraud.
  • some links cannot be cached
  • dynamic content cannot be cached anyway
  • pages can be explicitly marked as not to be cached
  • websites may fail or browsing become annoying
  • unintended side effects when visiting a web site that ascribes actions to links (e.g. exposing a "Cancel" or "Delete" action via a link)
  • users may receive error messages in connection with pages which they are not actually viewing
  • webmasters may block browsers that show signs of robot activity, or simply block browsers with the Fasterfox

    • Blocking

    As mentioned above, websites can use their robots.txt file to block Fasterfox's user agent from prefetching links to their documents (or to just some of their documents). Many websites do this in order to lower their bandwidth costs and improve responsiveness.

    Pop-up blocker

    Fasterfox also blocks pop-ups that appear as a results of Flash plug-ins (movies) and Flash exploits.

    References

    Fasterfox Wikipedia
    (Text) CC BY-SA