pmpatrick Posted April 15, 2006 Report Share Posted April 15, 2006 (edited) fasterfox is also banned on some websites due to its prefetching behaviour; it causes a huge increase in bandwith usage for website operators because it downloads every link on the page in the background even though most of those pages will never be viewed by the user. Webmasters hate fasterfox and a few sites will ban you if they detect you are using it others will issue periodic warnings requesting that you uninstall fasterfax. Edited April 15, 2006 by pmpatrick Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
arctic Posted April 15, 2006 Author Report Share Posted April 15, 2006 Correct. I got a mail once from an admin because of using fasterfox. I don't use it since that time as I had not realized the cons of using it. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
iphitus Posted April 15, 2006 Report Share Posted April 15, 2006 (edited) There are options to turn prefetching and any other setting used by fasterfox off. Prefetching is off by default, and marked that it should be used with care. If you got yourself in trouble, then it's only your fault ;) as for banning fasterfox.... theres no way for a website to detect that you are using it, so, it's not like you are going to be unable to view sites with it enabled. Edited April 15, 2006 by iphitus Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
arctic Posted April 15, 2006 Author Report Share Posted April 15, 2006 If you got yourself in trouble, then it's only your fault ;)I know... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
pmpatrick Posted April 15, 2006 Report Share Posted April 15, 2006 as for banning fasterfox.... theres no way for a website to detect that you are using it, so, it's not like you are going to be unable to view sites with it enabled. But they can detect if prefetching is being used and you will be blocked from some sites if it's on. Here's one of the comments from the extension download page: I was recently on a website and this is what they had to say: FORBIDDEN: Pre-fetching abuses our website. If you are using the browser extension 'FasterFox', it is very poor and will block you from websites that it abuses. Please uninstall it (and perhaps add a comment to the FasterFox page. If you are not running it, you are running some sort of poor extension that pre-fetches pages that it shouldn't (ones without a 'link' marker). Once you have done this, you can re-load this page. Note that if you do not remove the rogue program, you will continue to see this message occasionally. If everyone did this, it could easily quadruple the load on our server, and increase the total amount of wasted bandwidth on the Internet by 10 times or more. While we should be able to handle at least 10 times our current load, other websites aren't so lucky, and the operators may have to pay extra money as a result -- and perhaps shut down their websites. FasterFox abuses the Internet, there is no question about that. NOTE: There *are* a few other rarely used programs besides FasterFox that do this (there appears to be a rogue web proxy that does this too). For the whole story on this extension read the extensive user comments: https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/1269/comments/ As to the fasterfox defaults, some of the above comments indicate that the "Turbo" mode is activated by default which uses prefetching. There are tips in the user comments about how to turn this off but it appears that you have to affirmatively do so. Perhaps the defaults have been changed since those comments were posted. I think the bottom line is that prefetching is something that works well if only a few people are doing it. Once it becomes widespread, it kills small servers and gets a lot of webmasters up in arms with the greatly increased bandwith load caused by the prefetching. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
scarecrow Posted April 15, 2006 Report Share Posted April 15, 2006 I have tried this one, and I'm way less than impressed. But I can suggest/recommend kasehakase, which is just another Gecko hack, but it's REALLY very fast, stable and responsive. I guess that I'm rather too addicted to Firefox, but kasehakase is really GOOD stuff. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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