The fastest browser (Konqueror goes in the garbage can.)

English Applications
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Welcome openSuSE-rs, and mostly you, GNOME fans, that always wanted to have Konqueror in gnome.(Hacking is always not the best way to go.) Today I come before you, to give you an easy guide on how to get the fastest browser in the Linux world. Yes, it works on GNOME :). Let’s get started. What we’re basically doing is, we’re installing Swiftfox, witch is a firefox-like browser for linix, built for speed and performance. The question is… Is it fast enough ? Answer: Fast, but not enough. Idk about you people, but I personally operate on a laptop and I hate slow loading. So I researched here and there, and here’s how we do it.

  1. Let’s install Swiftfox.

You might want to visit Swiftfox Installer to get the vesion of the installer for you CPU.

Once installed simply load terminal, get under root and run

sh install-swiftfox.sh

Once installed, here comes the important steps. The developers of Swiftfox have done most of these, but there are a couple that they are missing. To run around and change Swiftfox/Firefox configuration, you can manually type in about:config in the address string and then simply press “enter” to get to the config file.

  1. Get the configuration that will give you blazing fast speed.

I looked at many websites, they have pretty much the same stuff, but the one I found has all of them in one place, well described and explained.

How To Speed Up Firefox

Simply follow all the steps listed there. Likewise I mentioned earlier some of those steps are already done by the developers of Swiftfox, but redoing them to make sure is not gonna hurt.

The 2 major steps are completed, there’s only one more thing.

  1. Lets wrap up and see how fast it got.

There’s one step in the manual config that is not listed in that website, simply because it’s really personal choice. I personally did not do it, because I like my “Back” button. If you don’t use it so often, since it takes up memory storing the websites you already visited so you can go back faster, you can remove that by finding browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers at the about:config tab, double clicking on the value and set the initial to 0. That will force Swiftfox not to store any web pages so it can easily access eventually.
Another thing that you can do, which is again a personal choice, is clean your downloading list. Believe it or not, it takes up a lot of memory(some of you might think:"oh, I got 8 gigs of memory, I don’t care about that…) Guess what: you’re wrong. Firefox has allowance to use only a certain part of those memory cells. I got 8 gigs and it does make a difference but it does not mean you’re limitless. Back to the topic. Clean your downloads list unless you need it as a reference of what you’ve been downloading. That way downloading will begin faster after the click.

Last but not least, Uninstall all unused add-ons. You might think they’re just some MBs and are really of no importance, but each one of them acts like a separate application and is loaded every single time your browser is loaded. So get rid of all the add-ons that you have disabled and you plan not to use in the near future.

There you go. Your Swiftfox(which is really just a Firefox) is now blazing fast, and I hope you all enjoyed it, especially all you broadband users. This should make your life a lot easier.

Thanks for reading. Good luck.

//Alek

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Hi there,

Just a feedback, I’ve tried swiftfox (or was it fasterfox?) some time ago. It did start much faster, almost instantaneous, but I felt no difference in browsing speed. Also some functionality was missing, particularly in that it would conflict with a firefox standard installation (so FF had to be removed) and had no translation packages, just English.

I remember concluding that just the faster start was not enough to replace FF. But that may have changed since.

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Have you tried what I listed above? try it, and for example(If you have Firefox aside of your Swiftfox) try loading a myspace page that has a whole s***load of junk on it… i.e. a lot of pictures, embed videos and things of this sort. Try loading the page with both browsers. It’s going to work only the first time you do it, since after that tmp images are going to be stored + make sure it’s not your myspace.com page since, you have prob already been there. Believe me, the difference is huge. Even when you have such connection …

http://i.dslr.net/imc/0/0/6/7/69390837.png

Try it and come back and post. I cannot guarantee, it’s just a tutorial to help people with slow connections.

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As it seems you’ve put quite some time into it you might want to consider posting this in the how-to part of the forum.

Or contacting a moderator to move the post there.
I already got ‘my fox’ set up the way I want it to, so can’t give any feedback.