Tech Weekly

If you are like a lot of folks on the net, you want to know your Internet speed. Well that is where this great Firefox Extension comes in. Broadband Speed Test and Diagnostics is a nice and hand built in Internet speed test and diagnostic. All you do is load it like any other extension and access it via the tools drop down. There you have four choices. You can check your download speed,  your upload speed, diagnose your connection or show you complete current network setup.

I have this loaded on my USB memory stick working on Firefox 3 Beta 3 and it is great. I know from time to time I like to check the connection speed of a computer that I might be working off it is not mine from home and this eliminates the need to go to Google and search for a Broadband Speed Test. Though I am still partial to Speedtest.net. Here is what you will see when you click on the tools drop down of the Firefox Toolbar.

Labels: Firefox, Firefox Friday

Want to cleanup your Firefox browser a little? Maybe get rid of some of the menu headers that you don't user or possibly all of them? Well it is quick and easy to do.

To get rid of say "Tools" and the "Help" menu items you would need to find the file userChrome.css. It will be located in Firefox's folder under the data and then the profile folder. All you need to do is right click on it and chose "EDIT" and add the following to the bottom of the file and save it.

/* Remove the Help and Tools menus */
menu[label="Tools"], menu[label="Help"] {
display: none !important; }

You could add all of the menu items if you wanted to or only the "Help" item. Its up to you.

Labels: Firefox

If you are like me not only do you not want to see those ads that a lot of very good web pages have but you also do not want to fight with pop-up windows that are also ads like the one shown to the left from Snap* Shots. They take up a lot of space in your window and of course most of us are conditioned so that if we see a "+" in the right hand corner of the window we assume that it will function the same as the Windows "X" in the corner of a open window and close it. However, when you click this for one of the pop-ups you get a second helping of advertising. We I have touched previously on how you can block this in Internet Explorer, Opera and Firefox. But if you just want to be done with seeing these ads from Snap* Shots quickly they have a javascript cookie you can load from their FAQ site HERE.

I know it sounds a little odd to say the least to tell you to go to the offending companies web site and click on a javascript word but it works and quickly. One thing to remember is that this works best for Internet Explorer and it will only work as long as you do not delete the cookie that this script has loaded.

Please see the snippet below and notice the bottom left corner where it says "SPA true". If you were to click the link again it would say "SPA false" and the Snap* Shots ads would once again be annoying you.

Labels: Firefox, IE, Opera

Well by now as popular as the Firefox browser is you would think that Mozilla or the Open Source community would have fixed the gaping memory leak that occurrs when you run Firefox with any amount of extensions or if you have more than a couple of tabs open.

This little tweak does not get rid of the memory leak but it might help you control it a bit. Here is what we will be doing. We are going to set Firefox so that when it is minimized it releases memory instead of sitting there continuing to hoard it and become bloated. The first thing you will need to do is open a blank tab like the one to the left and type in "about:config" without the quotation marks and hit enter. Next you need to put the following in the filter window "config.trim_on_minimize" if you already have this setting then all you need to do is choose "True" instead of the default "False"

If you do not have this setting then you will see nothing after you enter it in the filter window. This means that you will need to create this entry. You can do this by right clicking in the blank middle field of the window and choosing "New" and then "Boolean".

In the popup window you will need to enter "config.trim_on_minimize" and click ok.

Finally you will need to choose "true" and click ok. Once you close and restart the browser it will be good to go.

Labels: Firefox

If you are like most folks even though you may now have a fast Internet connection that is still not enough. You are still looking to wring just a little more speed out of your surfing experience. Well here today we have some quick tips for speeding up your web surfing experience using one of the three most popular browsers. If you do not have a broadband type connection to the Internet these tips will not be as helpful but you will still notice some improvement in your web surfing.

Internet Explorer: Remember to always make a backup copy of your registry before you make any changes. This can be very helpful if you make a small mistake and need to change it back. If you make a big mistake there's not much help for it so please be careful.

• Go to run window type "regedit"
• Click HKEY_CURRENT_USER
• Click "Software"
• Click "Microsoft"
• Click "Windows"
• Click "Current version"
• Click "Internet settings"
• Select New > DWORD Value from the Edit menu
• Name the new value MaxConnectionsPer1_0Server
• Right-click the MaxConnectionsPer1_0Server value and choose Modify
• Under Base, click the radio button next to Decimal
• In the Value Data: box enter the number of simultaneous connections you want to set (for example 10 is a good value), and click OK
• Select New > DWORD Value from the Edit menu
• Name the new value MaxConnectionsPerServer
• Right-click the MaxConnectionsPerServer value and choose Modify
• Under Base, click the radio button next to Decimal
• In the Value Data: box enter the number of simultaneous connections you want to set (for example 10 is a good value), and click OK
• Close Regedit and try IE again should notice a speedup. May need to close Internet Explorer and re-open

FireFox:

Search for the following entries and make the listed changes to them below.Use the entire entry up to the equal's sign. If an entry does not exist by default which several of them do not then you will need to create them. To do this right click below the filter window and choose new -->integer or new -->boolean. To know which one you need to choose it goes like this. Choose integer if the value you are going to add is a number and choose boolean if the value you are adding is "true" or "false" statement.

• network.http.pipelining=true
• network.http.proxy.pipelining=true
• network.http.pipelining.maxrequests=8
• content.notify.backoffcount=5
• plugin.expose_full_path=true
• ui.submenuDelay=0
• content.interrupt.parsing=true
• content.max.tokenizing.time=2250000
• content.notify.interval=750000
• content.notify.ontimer=true
• content.switch.threshold=750000
• nglayout.initialpaint.delay=0
• network.http.max-connections=48
• network.http.max-connections-per-server=16
• network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-proxy=16
• network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-server=8
• browser.cache.memory.capacity=65536

Firefox is allocated 4096 KB of memory by default and in this configuration we give it roughly 65MB as denoted by the last line. This can be changed according to what is used.

While there are some extensions and improvements that have been made with Firefox since some of these tweaks were first posted on the net I have found that they really do speed up Firefox noticeably

Opera:

Increasing total connections

• Type about:config in the address bar
• Enter connections into the search field
• Change the value of Max Connections Total from 20 to any value between 32 to 65
• Do not change the Max Connections per Server
• After you are done with the above just save the settings and restart browser

Name completion and local network machine

• Go to Tools> Preferences> Advanced> Network(or click Control and F12 same time)
• Select Server name completion
• Now you have two options within it.
  "Look For local network machine"
  "Try name completion"
• If you uncheck both of the above options, i.e.; Try name completion and Look for local network machine, Opera will stop cycling your CPU, trying to guess what you’re typing in the address bar
• Restart the browser after applying the settings. You’ll see the speed difference

Reduce the amount of visited pages in history

• Go to Tools> Preferences> Advanced> History (or click Control and F12 same time)
• Reduce addresses to 100 instead of 500 by default

Opera loading

• Go to Tools> Preferences> Advanced> Browsing> (or click Control and F12 same time)
• In the loading window choose "Redraw Instantly"

Tooltips

• Go to Tools> Preferences> Advanced> (or click Control and F12 same time)
• Uncheck "Tooltips"

Labels: Firefox, IE, Opera

Ever gone to a site that had those infernal double underlined words that no matter how hard you tried to not hover the mouse pointer over still managed to pop up those annoying IntelliTXT windows with basically useless information? Well I have been seeing them more and more often and I finally got sick and tired of dealing with them. Below you will find three quick fixes for IE7, Opera and Firefox. Sorry I have not found one for Safari yet if you know of one please drop the link in the comment section.

Programmer Brian Donovan has written a Greasemonkey script called Uh Oh IntelliTXT to block IntelliTXT popup's for Firefox users. IntelliTXT can also be deactivated with the Adblock plus Firefox extension by using the string *intellitxt.com* in your filter list.

To block IntelliTXT popup's in Opera browser, simply add the URL http://*.*.intellitxt.com/* into Tools > Advanced > Blocked Content.

To block IntelliTXT popup's in Internet Explorer 7, simply download and install IE7pro and add the string *intellitxt* to your Ad Filter list under the Block list.

For more info on how to avoid intellitxt and other annoying bubble pop ups see my newer article:

http://www.tech-weekly.com/2007/11/browser-tweaks-and-tips-how-to-load.html

Labels: Firefox, IE, Opera

Well if you are using Firefox. And seems like alot of folks are then a must have download is GreaseMonkey. It is a great little Firefox add-on that allows you to load a multitude of scripts that affect how a webpage acts. You can use a script from Greasemonkey to make your Gmail experience much easier to marking which RSS feeds on specific webpages you have already subscribed to. More on that tomorrow. In the meantime take a look at the GreaseMonkey SCRIPTS site and see if any of these scripts would benifit you. I know that I have found several that I have to use on a daily basis to help streamline my online experience.

Labels: Download of the day, Firefox