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Make Firefox startup faster.
dantheman:
Is it just me?
I found this tweak that seems to work at making Firefox load a bit faster.
Simply add a space and /Prefetch:1 to the target in program properties.
Can someone confirm i'm not hallucinating?
MilesAhead:
I don't think this refers to OS prefetch but to browser prefetch. In the old FasterFox AddOn one of the settings was to prefetch all the links in the page. Seemed like kind of a dangerous tweak to me.
4wd:
Actually it's for the OS Prefetcher, it's a, (generally), little known switch which, (IIRC - been a few years since I played with it), specifically loads the executable into the Prefetch data directory instead of relying on Windows' usage algorythmns to preload it. Wikipedia mentions it under Incorrect tweaking of the prefetcher in the Prefetcherw article.
The prefetcher for Firefox is (dis|en)abled under the about:config screen.
The value required is network.prefetch-next which is set to a default of True.
dantheman:
It's impressive to see real geeks at work!
So, from what i can make of what you said.
It's something that could possibly help some folks.
MilesAhead:
4wd How have you tested it? I've seen all kinds of conflicting info on this including that /prefetch:1 was supposed to be a param to differentiate content when using Windows Media Player(load different .dlls according to one blog, but that seems specious too because wouldn't you just go by the media file extension?)
In any case I've heard there was supposed to be some tweak to manually insert apps into the prefetch folder, but supposedly it doesn't work in any OS later than XP. Then again, I've also seen stuff about putting a "Superfetch" registry key in XP to do something similar. With MS you never know. They even had "undocumented" APIs, so just about anything could be true on one of their OS. I don't know how many Windows programming books I bought with "undocumented" in the title.
edit: btw this is an article similar to what I mentioned if not the same one on another page:
http://blogs.msdn.com/ryanmy/archive/2005/05/25/421882.aspx
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