Mozilla Firefox is an excellent web browser in itself, but what makes it the best browser is the large number of extensions and add-ons available from the Mozilla website. These extensions add to the features and functions of Firefox and make it even more useful. One of these extensions Fasterfox Lite claims to improve the Firefox browser by optimizing configurations for page prefetching, cache prefetching, page rendering and more. Fasterfox Lite is derived from another extension Fasterfox, that we have reviewed earlier, but many of the less useful or unnecessary features like the enhanced prefetching have been removed to improve the performance.
You can get the Fasterfox Lite extension from the Mozilla extensions repository. After the installation, it turns on the default preset for improving the Firefox performance, but you can always change the settings from the add-ons settings.
In the Fasterfox Lite settings, you can choose a preset from default, courteous, optimized or turbo charged. The default preset removes all the optimizations, the courteous preset enables the rendering and cache optimizations only, the optimized preset applies network optimizations to increase speed and so on.
Under the advanced options, you can choose to enable link prefetching to an expected webpage is loaded and displayed immediately. The cache settings optimize the memory cache, disk cache, DNS cache and the history cache. The connections preferences set the maximum number of connections for HTTP servers.
The pipelining options allow Firefox to send multiple requests to the same server without waiting for the response. But pipelining can put extra load on servers. The rendering options determine how a webpage is rendering in Firefox and make it render a little quicker.
The Fasterfox Lite works in the background and makes Firefox load webpages faster and display them more quickly. But these settings may put extra load on your network bandwidth as well as the system resources. The web servers receiving too many requests asynchronously also are put under extra pressure.
You can download Fasterfox Lite from https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/fasterfox-9148/.