FireTune

» see totalidea.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

FireTune arrived on 16 March 2005 as version 0.1, from Totalidea Software, a small German outfit already known for Tweak-XP and later TweakVI. Firefox 1 had shipped four months earlier and was winning on principle while losing on speed, with slow startup and sluggish rendering that everyone noticed and most people could not fix. The settings that fixed it existed, buried in about:config under names like network.http.pipelining and nglayout.initialpaint.delay, and editing them by hand meant trusting a forum post you half understood.

FireTune replaced that with two questions. You picked a profile describing your machine and your connection, something like fast computer with a fast connection, or slow computer with a fast connection, and it wrote the matching values into your Firefox user.js. A second tab held optional extras you could toggle individually. There was a restore button that put everything back if the result was worse, which was the feature that made it safe to recommend to someone else.

Version 1.0 landed in April 2005 with a tabbed interface. The last release, 1.2, came out on 23 June 2008 and worked with Firefox 3. It was freeware the whole time, in several languages, running on everything from Windows 98 to Vista.

~ the record ~

~ the tuning years ~

There was a real window, roughly 2005 to 2008, when browser tuning was not superstition. Connections were asymmetric and latency-bound, machines had half a gigabyte of RAM, and pipelining actually changed how a page felt. Around my university in that stretch everyone with any interest in their own machine was doing some version of this, and the tools came in a stack: something for Windows underneath, something for the browser on top. Donanimhaber and the other forums were full of before-and-after screenshots posted as evidence.

Then the premise expired. Mozilla kept folding the same optimizations into the browser itself, release after release, and by Firefox 3.6 the gains a profile could hand you were inside the noise. The release notes for that version are cited in FireTune's own Wikipedia article for exactly this reason. The browser was absorbing the tool's job on a perfectly ordinary release schedule, and that process was well underway by 2009.

~ removed over a logo ~

It did not get to die of redundancy. On 14 December 2009, a month before Firefox 3.6 was announced, Totalidea put up a page at the download URL titled "FireTune - no longer available," and the text is still legible in the archive:

"Due to the fact that the Mozilla Foundation disallows us to show the Firefox logo within our FireTune software, we are no longer able to distribute FireTune, otherwise we would face legal actions initiated by Mozilla. Because of that we have removed the FireTune product from our product catalogue and do no longer offer it for download. Downloads of FireTune from third party websites are out of our control."

Mozilla's trademark position was not unreasonable and was not aimed at anyone in particular. The Firefox name and logo were the asset an open-source project had instead of a patent portfolio, and an asset like that drains fast once third-party binaries start carrying it. But the collision is a strange one to read back. A free utility that did nothing except make Firefox run better was withdrawn because it was not permitted to say, in pictures, which browser it was for. Totalidea noted that copies already circulating on download sites were out of their hands, which is how FireTune actually carried on existing for years after it stopped existing.

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