First Hand With Firefox 3 Beta 2

ZDNet has taken a look at the second beta version of Firefox 3. The reporter says Firefox 3 feels faster and more responsive again and features improved memory management.

But it’s not new features that I’m interested in, it’s performance and reliability - so how does Firefox 3.0 Beta 2 stand up? Well, it’s only been out a few hours but I’ve been hammering it hard on several systems and my feeling is that beta 2 is a significant improvement on beta 1.

Functionally and visually, beta 1 and beta 2 are hard to tell apart, but after a few seconds of using them side-by-side I think that I could tell them apart on pretty much any system. Beta 2 feels snappier and far more responsive than beta 1 (or Firefox 2.0 for that matter) and I can feel the difference on all the systems that I’ve tried it on - from a lowly Sempron system to my quad-core monsters. No matter what you want doing - opening a new tab, moving tabs, opening up Find, zooming in and out of the page, bookmarking - it all happens swiftly and smoothly. Finally, Firefox feels like it’s back to being faster and more responsive than Internet Explorer. The bloat seems to have been trimmed away and what remains is fast.

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Increase Internet Explorer Download Limit

If you have ever tried to download several things simultaneously through Internet Explorer then you may have noticed that it doesn't work quite the way you may have hoped it to. This is because IE limits the amount of simultaneous downloads to two. This is done so that the perceived download progress appears to be tolerable. If you have a high speed connection then your browser should be able to handle a few more downloads. Here is 2 steps that will increase the simultaneous download tasks from IE and also increase their speeds.

This is to increase the the number of max downloads to 10.

#1. Start Registry Editor.Type regedit command in Run.

#2. Locate the following key in the registry:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\
CurrentVersion\Internet Settings

#3. On the Edit menu, click Add Value (a Dword) , and then add the following registry values:

"MaxConnectionsPer1_0Server" = Dword : 0000000a (Type a selecting Hexadecimal)
"MaxConnectionsPerServer" = Dword : 0000000a

#4. Quit Registry Editor.