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Interesting (bogus) Firefox tweak


greenknight

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This was posted on the Mozillazine Firefox forum, guy put together some code that changes the way Firefox (or Flock) gets Web content: http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=560802

This does seem to really increase the speed of Firefox rendering Web pages. Thought some of the power users here might like to check it out; I wouldn't be surprised if this code gets incorporated into future versions of Firefox. That is, unless there's some problem with it that's not readily apparent...

<edit> Changed the topic heading to reflect the fact that it doesn't really work. <end edit>

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Seriously, I don't know if this really does anything at all - but he's got a lot of people convinced that it does make Firefox faster. Is it real, or just the placebo effect?

I thought this sounded unlikely; but when I tried it, it seemed like it helped. However, when I actually tried to compare page loading times, they vary so much that it's impossible to tell. I guess that explains why some users are convinced Fasterfox is great... :nyah:

So, what do you think? Is it possible that this guy's code really works, or is he just full of **** :hello:

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Seriously, I don't know if this really does anything at all - but he's got a lot of people convinced that it does make Firefox faster. Is it real, or just the placebo effect?

I thought this sounded unlikely; but when I tried it, it seemed like it helped. However, when I actually tried to compare page loading times, they vary so much that it's impossible to tell.

I was thinking the exact same thing!

It is possible that the tweak does have an effect which results in performance increasement. I have not tried it, but I believe it would be small enough, that people would not really notice it.

A scientific benchmark would be interesting to see...

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Well, he posted his code on Bugzilla and a Firefox dev reviewed it. His conclusion was that it didn't do anything, and he marked the bug "Invalid".

It goes to show, you can't rely on your impression that a performance tweak works - speed is highly variable, and the power of suggestion is strong. Most of those who tried this though it helped, it even seemed like it to me. However, when I timed page loading in repeated trials, it averaged out the same.

Of course, there was one user who thought it slowed down the browser - so you can be fooled either way.

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