Auslogics Blog

Mozilla web browsers (Firefox and Flock) are my absolute favourites, so, like many of you, I’ve been waiting for Firefox 3.5 to come live. Now that we all had a chance to use Firefox 3.5 for some time,  let me share with you which of it’s new and improved features I like best.

1. I know this is not exactly a feature and it doesn’t sound too creative, but for me the number one improvement is speed. Firefox 3.5 uses the TraceMonkey JavaScript engine instead of the SpiderMonkey engine used in Firefox 3. As a result Firefox 3.5 is more than twice as fast as Firefox 3. Take a look at the SunSpider test results (in milliseconds). The test was performed on a Windows XP computer:

An additional improvement is better memory usage – Firefox 3.5 is not as heavy on RAM as the previous version.

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Adobe PDF is just about the best format for sending and receiving documents. For example, as a classical music lover I can tell you that most music scores available online are in PDF, because PDFs are small and are easy to upload and send via email. But what if you need to create or edit a PDF document, or fill in a PDF form? That could be a problem if you don’t have Adobe’s software installed. Well, not really. There is a number of free tools to create and edit PDF documents that don’t need to be downloaded or installed – you can use them from any computer that has an Internet connection. Here are 5 top tools to create and edit PDFs online.

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If you’ve recently visited the Firefox add-ons website, I’m sure you liked its new design and organization. Now it’s a lot more user-friendly and finding and installing add-ons has never been easier. But that’s not all – the new Collections and the Add-On Collector extension are the real corkers!

So, what are Collections? Simple, really – they are packs with various add-ons, themes, and language packs. For example, there is a collection called Reference Desk, which is really handy for students. This collection consists of 13 add-ons, including Hyperwords (one of my favourites), Merriam-Webster dictionary, and Read It Later – a handy little add-on that lets you bookmark pages you want to read later without adding them to your actual bookmarks.

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Image by mtellin

Netbooks are great, especially if you are on the move, or you’re a student, or just want to be able to browse the Internet  and be able to do some work from anywhere. And you don’t want to be carrying a big heavy laptop with you. That’s the case with me – I travel a lot and got really tired of dragging my laptop during the day and my shoulder aching in the evening!

Some people say that netbook are only for browsing the web and running lightweight applications. Of course, that’s partly true, but you can always enhance your netbook experience with a little optimization.

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By default your browser history is kept for way too long, which takes up system resources and slows down the browser.  Limiting history size is an excellent way to quickly speed up your browser.

Firefox users:

1. Go to Tools - Options
2. Click on Privacy
3. Then select any number under Keep my history for at least … days. I have it on 7.
4. 
5. Click OK

By the way, if you don’t want to keep any private data at all, simply check Always clear my private data when I close Firefox. To specify what you want cleared, click on the Settings button and check relevant checkboxes.

Internet Explorer 8 users:

1. Go to Tools - Internet Options
2. Under Browsing History click on the Settings button
3. Select a number to keep you browsing history
4. 
5. Before you click OK I would recommend forbidding the browser to check for newer version of stored pages (select Never) and allowing 50MB of disk space to store Temporary Internet Files (the default number is ridiculous).

Enjoy a faster browser!

If you’ve ever used Firefox, you probably would never go back to IE, because Firefox is so much more comfortable to use, intuitive, and fast. And there are all those add-ons that, in my opinion, make it simply the best.

However, having too many add-ons can make the browser slow down and annoy you. To make it fast again, simply run Internet Optimizer, which is part of Auslogics BoostSpeed. With Internet Optimizer you can optimize your connection and browser settings. After running this tool Firefox will be as fast as ever.

But, to tell you the truth, with fast Internet connections available these days speed is not that much of an issue (unless something is really wrong with your settings). I mean, so pages will take 2 milliseconds less to render and your download speed will improve a bit – that’s not really a big deal anymore!

What is important, though, is your browsing experience – usually you don’t sit there for ages waiting for a page to load, but rather waste a lot of time clicking links one by one, looking for the entry you need in your right-click menu, and so on.

Luckily, Firefox has add-ons and here is a list of the ones that save me a lot of time and speed up my browsing experience.

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