Fasterfox

» see fasterfox.mozdev.org as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Fasterfox had five presets in its settings window and the last one was called Extreme. The Russian build of that dialog, which is the version that happens to survive as a screenshot, describes the option as maximum performance exceeding the requirements of the RFCs, with a note in brackets that it increases the load on the server. An extension shipped to the general public with a button that said, in effect, this setting is rude.

The rest of it was a front end for about:config. Tony Gentilcore wrote it in 2005 and it put the network preferences that Firefox buried into a tabbed window: cache sizes, how many simultaneous connections to open, HTTP pipelining, how long the browser waits before it paints the first thing it has received. Changing those by hand meant typing preference names from memory. Fasterfox gave you a radio button and a dialog, and eleven million people downloaded it.

The speedup was real on a 2005 connection, and the Extreme preset delivered most of it, for the reason you would expect: it was taking more than its share. The reason your browser felt quicker was that it had already fetched the page you had not clicked yet.

~ the case file ~

~ the prefetch war ~

Link prefetching was the feature everybody argued about. With it switched on, Fasterfox quietly downloaded every link on the page you were reading, so that whichever one you chose was already in the cache. From the user's chair this is close to magic. From the server's side, one visitor reading one page had just requested forty.

Webmasters noticed inside a few months. Ben Metcalfe wrote the first widely-read complaint in November 2005, titled "Fasterfox: when Firefox Extensions go bad!", and by February 2006 there were blog posts circulating with the exact Apache rules to refuse the extension's requests. Small sites on metered hosting were watching bandwidth they were paying for go to pages nobody looked at. This was two years before bandwidth got cheap enough for anyone to shrug about it.

Version 1.0.3 answered the complaints by checking robots.txt before prefetching, which handed the decision back to the site. That is the settlement the whole web eventually reached on prefetching, written into browsers as a header and an attribute years later. Fasterfox reached it first because it had made enough people angry to need to.

~ the tweak threads ~

Turkish hardware forums in the TTNet years ran on this stuff. DonanımHaber and frmtr had threads hundreds of posts deep about making Firefox faster, usually a pasted list of preference names and values with somebody underneath insisting the pipelining number should be thirty instead of eight, and I was in those forums with my component list in my signature. Whether I ever installed Fasterfox itself or only pasted the values out of a post is not something I can reconstruct now. The promise was identical either way, and so was the part where you convinced yourself it felt quicker afterward.

~ what came after ~

Gentilcore stopped maintaining the extension after 2007, which left it incompatible with Firefox 3.0, and the rights were sold the following year to a maintainer who kept it alive and produced Fasterfox Lite, the same tool with the catch-all prefetching removed. gHacks covered that version in October 2008. The author himself went to Google for a decade, worked on the search results page, then founded and led the Chrome Speed Team, which is the hobbyist's version of a happy ending: the man who wrote the make-my-browser-faster hack got the job of making the browser faster.

Firefox 57 shipped on 14 November 2017 and stopped loading XUL extensions, so every legacy add-on on every machine went inert on the same afternoon, Fasterfox with them. The project page stayed up long after the extension stopped loading. fasterfox.mozdev.org kept serving its two kilobytes until June 2020, then started redirecting, and the hostname has no DNS record left now that mozdev has wound down. fasterfox.com was never the home of any of this; it has been parked for fifteen years, and it still redirects you to a lander.

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