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

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If you are looking for a great download manager, or a tool that improves your download speeds then take a look at iGetter (available for both Windows and Macs). iGetter integrates with your chosen web browser and takes over the handling of the download task(s).

iGetter allows you to queue up downloads, have multiple downloads running, schedule timed downloads (for example when your ISP has less traffic), resume interrupted/broken downloads (this depends on the website you are downloading from as it’s protocol dependent), and perhaps one of the most important features is iGetter can open many connections to one site, each connection or stream will download a different section of the same file, in most cases this allows for blazingly fast downloads (bandwidth allowing). Read the rest of this entry »

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 »