Firefox 3 Beta 5 bug.

I have recently discovered a flaw in FF3b5: It crashes on some Flash apps, especially the more demanding ones, such as Pandora Internet Radio, and such. Fortunately, since Firefox saves all of your tabs in the event of a crash such as that, it is not that big of a problem, I just open the program again, and, if I really need/want the troublesome flash app, and it crashes several more times, I will use FF2 to open the page. I use FF2 for Pandora, now.

Facebook IM: Review.

Facebook finally came out with it’s long-awaited IM service.  Within a few hours, I had held conversations with 3 friends, 2 of which I had never before had any sort of IM chat with, ever.  The entire application is in the form of a little bar at the bottom of the window.  it has a icon for your notifications, and an icon indicating how many people are currently online.  you click the icon, and it shows you who is online.  click the appropriate person, and a little windows pops up, allowing you to chat with them. This window is ebmedded in the page, and so if you navigate away from it, it closes.  However, it can pop-out, and become a seperate window, with a slightly easier interface.  The concept is ingenious, and the convience is incredible, but the interface is lousy.  I use Pidgin for Myspace IM and Gtalk, and I will add Facebook IM when it is available on Pidgin, but, until then, I will just have to suffer with the need to have a browser windows open, coupled with a lousy-looking and feeling interface, and no transfer capability whatsoever.

If you are not viewing the window, and someone says something, no alert comes up in any form.  That is really annoying, especially for me, as a multi-tasker.  I like to talk to people, and then go to another desktop on Linux, and do something else, while I am chatting with someone.  with every other IM program, my icon that represents that open window, on my snazzy dock, will bounce up and down, twirl, and a tinny spotlight appear under it (the equivalent of the application in the start bar flashing on Windows).  that does not happen, so I have to keep looking back at it to see if someone has said something.  Also, it is incredibly slow.  it takes a significant amount of time for a person’s message to show up on the other person’s screen, and therefore the conversation takes a lot longer, and I have a fast internet connection.  Also, it crashed while I was using it.  The application froze, a window came up, saying it could not connect to Facebook IM, and I could not load my facebook home page, back on my main Firefox window.  I could load other pages, however.  Eventually, it reconnected, and the first message, a paragraph long, displayed 3 times, the second message, a “yes” repeated twice, and the third message that I typed immediately before the fluke, appeared only once.  Also, I was typing, immediately after that, and my friend said something, so I erased what I was about to say, and was about to type something else, when I realized that Facebook had interjected a little smiley, without me doing anything, and sent it. ugh…

In conclusion, my analysis of this application, is that it is a wonderful concept, but could easily be a LOT better.  I give this 3 stars.

Enjoy… or not.

How to speed up Firefox in 7 quick steps.

Last night, as it was a Friday, and we are not having school next week, I did what i enjoy doing the most: I browsed the Internet for ways to speed up my internet/Firefox. Now, it you don’t use Firefox, then I have only one comment: WIWWY?!? (what is wrong with you)!!! In case you aren’t using it, download it here. It is a much better browser than IE, with the capability to install plug-ins that add functionality to it, visual themes/eye candy, and the ability to change it however you want.

Anyway, I ran across a few videos, most of which were pretty pathetic, but I managed to find one that was really popular, that explained a lot of things. I also got one or two of these from other videos.

Step 1) Open a new tab. in the URL section, type “about:config”

Step 2) You will see a list of stuff that you most likely cannot understand. Do not worry. Oh, and unless you know what you are doing, do not mess with any of the other options on there. It could ruin your browser. In the search bar at the top, type: “pipelining” You should see two or three options. I have three, and they are:

network.http.pipelining
network.http.pipelining.maxrequests
network.http.proxy.pipelining

All you need are the top two, for this tutorial, so, if you do not have the third one, do not panic.

Step 3) Double-click the first option. It should now be bold, and say “user set” and “true. See, that wasn’t so hard, was it?

Step 4) Double-click the second option. It should bring up an option window that has a number. I think the default is 4. Change it to anywhere between 20-100, I guess, it doesn’t really matter. From what I understand how it works, however, you should set it according to how strong your internet connection is. If it is stronger, set it higher. If it is lower, set it lower. This enables Firefox to load multiple packets from sites, simultaneously. Normally, it downloads one 1.5kb packet at a time, and then does the next, which, if you are just loading simple pages such as google, wikipedia, etc, then you will most likely not notice a difference. But, for pages loaded with images/flash objects/heavy HTML/Javascript, like Myspace, Facebook, news sites, game sites, stores, etc., this will enable them to load much faster.

Step 5) On the search bar, erase “pipelining” and replace it with “max-persistent”

This should show several options as well, depending on what addons you have installed. All you need is this one however:

network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-server

Step 6) Double-click this, and raise it to whatever number you want, I would suggest the same as you set the last one to, simply because it depends on the connection strength, too, and because I do not entirely understand what it does, only that it works, and I do not want you to set it to something that will kill your browser.

Step 7) (note: this can cause a lag when going back in a page, so is probably not a good idea for people who use the internet primarily for sites like Google and Wikipedia. ) search for “browser.sessionhistory”, double click it, and set it to zero(”0″). This tells the browser to not keep the previous page(s) in memory, which enables it to load another page faster, since it does not have to store the current one somewhere else. Note: this should not disable your ability to go back a page, it will just disable your ability to back to the previous page instantly, not having to load it again. If you have a good internet connection, and already load pages fairly fast, then this is a good choice, but if you are reading this post on how to make it go faster because it is currently painfully slow, then I do not recommend this.

I do not know if you need to restart your browser/computer before these take effect, as I shut down my computer and went to bed after I was done, and I am noticing a big improvement today.

Note: you can always install either Google Web Accelerator(IE and Firefox), or the Firefox plugin called FasterFox. Do not install both. I recommend the first one, I do not use the second, but other people says it helps. Running both, though, will make it even slower than before. Also, FasterFox does not help on some computers/connections, according to reviewers.

Original video showing how to modify the about:config file included for the geeks who can understand the technobabble, and the people that have a stronger internet connection and like to watch videos.

.odt version (aka downloadable manual)

Faster Firefox