Firefox, is it worth
- Thread starter brucey034
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- 19 Dec 2008
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FasterFox is a pre emptive caching plug-in. This means the plug-in pre-fetches content by following any hyper-links on the page and storing this in the browser's caching mechanisms, therefore the page should load more or less instantly when you navigate to it.
A massive disadvantage of this is that internet traffic is not 'free', so by pre-fetching aggressively you unnecessarily use bandwidth, power and resources of the website holder (a waste of money). In addition, it risks breaking any statistics the website is attempting to collect (server-side they are no longer able to determine what you were actually looking at versus what the plug-in just pre-fetched).
All in all an approach which is entirely unsuitable for the Internet.
So the software is often 'worth it' from a client perspective (assuming you don't have an exceedingly low bandwidth allowance), but extremely costly/antisocial/destructive from the content provider's point of view.
It switches on features like HTTP pipelining as well, which in some cases will cause sites to stop loading properly, and doesn't cleanly remove itself (i.e. reset all the settings it touches).
It's written for the same reasons as people publishing lists of about:config settings to change. They don't understand what they're doing.
It's written for the same reasons as people publishing lists of about:config settings to change. They don't understand what they're doing.
