Anyone else using Mozilla Firefox?

Lol - my IE has just gone crazy!!! I think it is feeling slighted - won't open ANY new windows - just opens everything in the same one - with no back button!!!

Damn!

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Listen fellas, if you don't want to respect R&D done at fine universities, great, but rudeness is simply unnecessary.

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I was not being rude, and quite frankly have held back because you are so sensitive about having your computer BS (pardon the bluntness) corrected. If I refute the foolish advice it is for the benefit of others at this point. I've tried to help you many times and you seem to just get irritated that I say something that you firmly believe differently from.

And for the benefit of others I restate, "dial up acceleration" does not exist. It is a hardware impossibility. This is not done to be rude, this si done because this is a simple fact.

What people call "dial up acceleration" is just caching and compressing and in your case it sounds like it's only plugging into IE and subsequently making IE glitchy. And because of this I caution others.

This is not to ignore "university research", if a university is "researching" this they probably know what I have stated and make plugins to do exactly what myself and Timber said, cache and compress.

Since this is a very very basic type of application it's likely a low level project (certainly needs no "research") and from teh result you describe it sounds like equally low level code.

This type of "accelerator" rarely does much to help and frequently causes local load issues (and from what you describe it really sounds like it's having problems with IE and not touching Firefox at all, despite your guess that it's working well with Firefox). This, of course, assumes it's not a fraudulent piece of software that is a vector for a malicious payload.

I'm sorry that you find it "rude", I avoid helping you with your computer for this very reason (stubbornly insisting that you are right when it's plain to knowledgable folk that you are not) but I like to set the technical record straight for the benefit of others.

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Anyone got time to say how "caching and compressing" works in terms of download?

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Depends on what you download. The best "accelerators" work primarily with HTML, text and most of all web images.

So it wouldn't help at all if you were downloading a large music file for example.

What it would aim to do is make pages appear to load more quickly and the main way it would do this would be by lowering the quality of all the images and thereby compressing them.

Thing is, that adds CPU overhead to your computer and can sometimes make things a lot slower because of the buggy attempts to compress images.

Thing is, besides the image compression you can get a lot of the benefits simply by allocating a large amount to your local cache. You can do that by fiddling with a few settings and won't need any software.

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As to how cache works: basically, the first time you download a file (like a web image, CSS, JS or even a static page) it's saved to your harddrive in a "cache".

The next timeyou request it it will be served off your local hard drive (the cache) and thusly display without any download time needed, making the display limited by the speed ofreading your harddrive instead of the speed to tarnsfer the file.

You can change your IE cache settings at:

Tools > Internet Options > General > Temporary Internet Files > Settings

"Check for newer versions..." should usually be set to "Automatically" and the more disk space you allocate to it the more page loads you will optimzie with cache.

Note that if you empty your cache regularly it would then limit the benefits.

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dlowan wrote:

So - there is no means to import them as Firefox imported the IE ones for me - ie it prompted me to select either Opera or IE during the set-up process?

Did you see my suggestion earlier to try clicking 'File -> Import' in Firefox & bringing the other browser's favorites, etc. over that way? Does that not work?

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As for so-called dialup accelerators, yup, gotta agree with what's been said by Craven & Timber so far. The minor improvements usually aren't worth the quality loss, system performance degredation & problems.

By the way, another common method them thingies use to make the impression they're boosting your Internet speed is by blocking ads. However, they're usually not great tools for the job.

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Craven de Kere wrote:

Depends on what you download. The best "accelerators" work primarily with HTML, text and most of all web images.

So it wouldn't help at all if you were downloading a large music file for example.

Let me clarify this as it can be misleading:

"Dial up accelerators" and most "web accelerators" won't help with large file downloads.

Another class of software is a "download accelerator" (also not really accelerating, and a better term is "download manager"). And those can be very useful.

First of all, they can be useful to all connection speeds for their queuing and resuming features (the resumign is especially valuable to dial up users, as they can shut down and finish th downoad later).

And for faster connections they can fetch files more quickly by splitting it up and downloading multiple segments at once. For files on servers that throttle individual conections it can make a world of a difference to a broadband user (thoughfor a dialup user it is unlikely that they will be throttled more than their ow connection does).

For people who download a lot of files at once (e.g. downloading stock photography or multiple videos from a colelction) its queuing features can be a godsend.

But like the other accelerators out there a lot of these range from fraud and malware to just buggy. But I do want to point out that the good ones can be very helpful (as opposed to the page compressors that are usually only marginally helpful).

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Monger wrote:

dlowan wrote:
So - there is no means to import them as Firefox imported the IE ones for me - ie it prompted me to select either Opera or IE during the set-up process?

Did you see my suggestion earlier to try clicking 'File -> Import' in Firefox & bringing the other browser's favorites, etc. over that way? Does that not work?

Yikes - I DID miss it Monger - I will have a go.

Embarrassed

Worked! Doh!!!!

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Craven de Kere wrote:

Craven de Kere wrote:
Depends on what you download. The best "accelerators" work primarily with HTML, text and most of all web images.

So it wouldn't help at all if you were downloading a large music file for example.

Let me clarify this as it can be misleading:

"Dial up accelerators" and most "web accelerators" won't help with large file downloads.

Another class of software is a "download accelerator" (also not really accelerating, and a better term is "download manager"). And those can be very useful.

First of all, they can be useful to all connection speeds for their queuing and resuming features (the resumign is especially valuable to dial up users, as they can shut down and finish th downoad later).

And for faster connections they can fetch files more quickly by splitting it up and downloading multiple segments at once. For files on servers that throttle individual conections it can make a world of a difference to a broadband user (thoughfor a dialup user it is unlikely that they will be throttled more than their ow connection does).

For people who download a lot of files at once (e.g. downloading stock photography or multiple videos from a colelction) its queuing features can be a godsend.

But like the other accelerators out there a lot of these range from fraud and malware to just buggy. But I do want to point out that the good ones can be very helpful (as opposed to the page compressors that are usually only marginally helpful).

Thanks Craven - that is interesting.

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I'll note I do use a download manager, and find it to be a big help. Queing, scheduling, resume, and multiple download streams are great features. Dialup users prolly won't get much if any use out of multiple download streams, but the other features fit right in with dialup's limitations ... particularly the resume feature.

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When I need to queue a bunch of files to download, my download manager of choice has been the free, spyware-free LeechGet ( www.leechget.net/en ).

I also use the shareware (most functions work freely), spyware-free Net Transport ( www.xi-soft.com ) at times because of it's ability to download streaming Windows Media Audio. E.g. many online radio sites stream audio and MSN Music often posts full new albums for streaming, & this would allow you to download them.

Many of the most popular download managers, however, bundle spyware & adware (similar to dialup accelerators).

dlowan wrote:

Yikes - I DID miss it Monger - I will have a go.

Worked! Doh!!!!

Cool...

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Monger wrote:

Many of the most popular download managers, however, bundle spyware & adware (similar to dialup accelerators).

That bears emphasizing. Here's a slightly dated, but still usefull overview of Download Managers

BTW ... LeechGet pretty much is my first choice ... it works for me, though that just means it works for me.

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Bookmarks -> Manage Bookmarks -> File -> Import

You may have to export your opera bookmarks first.

Also, sessionsaver has some great features, just make sure you've got the ones you want set in the sessionsaver properties.

I've been using Firefox nearly exclusively (except for Windows Update and the occasional site coded by a M$ apologist (non-standard code) for over a year (ever since starting a new job where some of my workmates used it exclusively).

I'm going home soon and will install XP on my dad's system and Firefox as the default browser. No more spyware on his system Smile

It's not the end-all and be-all of browsing, but it's a far sight better than IE.

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All my questions answered here. That's swell.

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Great.

I have been looking for something Craven said vis a vis Opera and Firefox, in Opera's favour...but I can't.

I would have a look at both, mebbe?

Anyone else using Mozilla Firefox?

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