Fasterfox Pre-Fetching

hi to all who use,

simple question:

enable or disable?

give your reasons.

 

You may find this thread useful

 

thanks but it didnt answer my question.

 

Disable, because:

1) I don't like the idea of my browser prefetching every link on a given web page, even though I am not sure that there is any security risk.
2) My understanding is that it can increase the load on a web server, and there are web servers who have denied access to those using Fasterfox for this reason, and
3) For the brief time I enabled prefetching (before I was aware or 1 & 2), I really did not notice much of a difference.

 

If I go on a forum with 20 links and it prefeteches them all, but I only visit 10, then thats 10 items in my cache I dont need and could well of removed items that I will visit again.

Also there is the server load... in the case above I've doubled the traffic to the server for no good reason and it will cost someone ££ (as well as negative enviromental impact is the wasted electricty used).

Also, what if I prefetch all 20 pages but 10 get updated before i get to visit the pages, thats a further 10 pages reloads - really evil for a dynamic website, eg a forum like Wilders.

From the cache point of view, how fast do we pre cache pages, do we have a read ahead limit per site, or is it global, do we have any rules for removing old cache items, will the optimum setting for read-ahead conflict with the setting for historic, what would be the best compromise between these settings ?

As you can see, its quite a can of worms and it seems like a nasty hack to me.

 

Disabled.

I don't like putting a load on other folks servers.

I don't really see a need for it.

It's all hype IMHO.

I when I have Fasterfox Enabled in Fx I use it with the Default or Courteous presets. No real difference as far as I can tell. One feature I like is the Page Load Timer, which, comes in handy when testing page load times on my firewall

 

I can only speak for me, but I cant say that Fastefox did anything for me when i had it installed. Maybe it is only good for people with ADSL or modems? I have fiber.
Of course it is good to prefetch all the links you intend to read - as long as you wait until they have been downloaded. Load a page, wait for awhile until all the links are downloaded and then click on the link of course they will load faster, but if you load a page and one or two seconds later you click on a link wont do anything.
Usually I only click one or two links on a page anyway, and a page can have many many links.

But doing the simple tweaks in the thread suggested by lucas1985 here really did a big difference for me and the speed when loading pages.