PC Mechanic, New Article

Memory Fox 7.02 For Firefox
Test Your Website’s Speed With Stella
Opera 11 – Is It Still A Contender?

Posted: 14 Apr 2011 03:00 AM PDT

As most people are aware, Firefox is a memory-munching monster. There is, however, a fix for this with the add-on Memory Fox. So what’s the problem? It’s not available for download because it hasn’t been approved yet. The only way to get it is to email the developer directly.

So I did just that and received v7.02 of Memory Fox:

The first question anyone wants answered when it comes to this is: Does it work?

You bet your ass it does.

Memory Fox, simply put, is amazing. Any hint of Firefox going into memory-chunk-o mode is put at bay by this add-on and does so in fine style.

The way it works is that there is a separate resident exe, afom.exe which you can see in the Task Manager when Memory Fox is active:

As you can see from above, Memory Fox itself almost uses nothing for memory use, but the job it does for Firefox is beyond wonderful.

When’s the last time you saw Firefox use this little memory with four tabs open?

Probably never – that is unless you’ve used Memory Fox before.

This add-on is also smart enough to where it can be configured to reclaim memory immediately or in the future:

This is actually very cool because there are times when you want Memory Fox to wait a bit before attempting to reclaim/release memory, particularly when you load web sites that contain a lot of data; if Memory Fox kicks in too quickly it can do more harm than good in that respect. This isn’t a problem since you can instruct this add-on to wait to reclaim anywhere from 0 minutes (instant) to 1 hour.

When will Memory Fox be available in the Mozilla Firefox add-ons directory?

Soon, hopefully.

I was so happy to get this add-on back that words can’t express the joy. I’m not kidding. Memory Fox, at least to me, is a mandatory add-on to have installed just to make the browser usable. I can install as many add-ons as I want and simply not worry about it when it comes to memory use and release. If I didn’t have this add-on, I’d be using IE9 and/or Chrome full time because both those browsers separate tabs into separate processes whereas Fx doesn’t do that. Yet.

Post from: PCMech. Helping Normal People Get Their Geek On And Live The Digital Lifestyle.

Memory Fox 7.02 For Firefox

Test Your Website’s Speed With Stella

Posted: 13 Apr 2011 08:00 AM PDT

Another online tool that web developers can use to measure site performance is the simple to use Stella. This utility, when provided a URL, measures the time it takes to fetch your DNS records, receive a response from the server and download the full page of content. Overall, this is a good indicator of how fast your site is.

One nice feature about Stella is that it remembers tests run against the same site recently so you can see if tweaks you may have made make a difference. Additionally, you can see how your site’s performance stacks up against other queries which have been run against the service.

While this tool doesn’t make any suggestions on ways to improve your site, the data is gives you can at least get you an idea of how fast (or slow) your site is.

Post from: PCMech. Helping Normal People Get Their Geek On And Live The Digital Lifestyle.

Test Your Website’s Speed With Stella

Opera 11 – Is It Still A Contender?

Posted: 13 Apr 2011 07:00 AM PDT

The top 5 browsers on the desktop (meaning not mobile) are, in this order:

Internet Explorer (45.11%)
Mozilla Firefox (29.98%)
Google Chrome (17.37%)
Apple Safari (5.02%)
Opera (1.97%)

Opera is at #5 in the world browser market for a few very good reasons.

Internet Explorer commands the largest share of the market because it came bundled with Windows ever since later editions of Windows 95 (not including the recent EU decision concerning Windows 7 where it wasn’t and replaced with a browser ballot decision on OS install), and of course Windows is the #1 OS in the world as we know it.

Mozilla Firefox commands the #2 position because of blitz-style advertising they’ve been doing in an on-again/off-again fashion since the mid-2000s.

Google Chrome has market share only because Google is the #1 search engine on the planet.

Apple Safari while at #4 has that position largely because it comes bundled with Mac OS X.

Then there’s Opera. It does not come bundled with any major OS (Nintendo Wii’s OS isn’t for the desktop, obviously), nor does Opera blitz-advertise itself at all, nor does Opera have the advantage placing a big-ass button to install itself on the #1 search engine’s home page:

(The above only happens when you visit Google.com with IE, by the way.)

Anyway, the point is that Opera, even as good as it is, simply doesn’t have the "influence" so to speak to compete against the other major players; the fact it has 1.97% of the world browser market share is pretty impressive when that’s taken into consideration.

I personally believe Opera 11 is a good browser. A damned good one, actually. Will it ever rise up the ranks? Unlikely for the reasons stated above. But it’s still great.

Here’s a video I did on what I personally like about Opera 11. If you haven’t used the browser in a while, definitely check it out at www.opera.com. It is of course free to download and use.