The MacTrack – iPhone, iPod, iPod Touch and Mac News

Do you wish you could see thumbnail previews of all the tabs you have open in Firefox?  Well now you can with the great Firefox Showcase add-on.

This add-on allows you to display thumbnails of all open tabs in a variety of ways: single window, tab or in a sidebar.

To choose a tab just click on the preview image.  To access the preview thumbnails click on the tab drop-down on the far right of the tab bar.

Try it – you’ll love it!

By default Firefox only opens one connection at a time when loading a web page.

On fast broadband connections this isn’t usually too much of a problem but should your speed drop at busy times, or if pages seems to load slowly there’s a great little tweak you can implement called “Pipelining”.

It’s also beneficial to fast connections as speed increases can still be seen.

Once ‘pipelining’ is set-up Firefox, will (by default) open many connections simultaneously to the website and retrieve the all the page’s elements in one go. Even on my fast broadband connection this has made a huge difference to my browsing page load times.

To enable Pipelining follow the simple steps below (it looks harder than it really is, in fact it’s fairly simple):

1. In the Firefox address bar enter: about:config and press return/enter
   This displays the internal configuration and system settings of Firefox
2. If prompted, accept the warning message that cautions against modifying the system settings:

   

3. In the filter/search field enter: network.http
4. This restricts the list to the entries for the HTTP protocol

   Read the rest of this entry »

Just a quick note regarding web browsers (aimed mostly at new Mac users). When I used to/had to use Windows I used Internet Explorer (IE) and then progressed to Firefox. On Apple Macs IE is not available (hurrah!) so what are your choices?

My 3 main browsers of choice are:

Firefox – Available at getfirefox.com

Camino – Available at caminobrowser.org

Safari – Available at www.apple.com/safari

Depending on the website you visit you may find one of the above browsers more suited than others (for example, Camino for Wordprss blog editing).