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More help is on the way for high Firefox memory usage

Dave Farquhar Software July 6, 2011July 6, 2011chrome, firefox, keyboard shortcuts, Task Manager

After years of workarounds, and even sometimes denying there was a problem, Mozilla has identified a fix for Firefox’s sometimes out-of-control memory usage.

The culprit appears to be the Javascript engine, which probably shouldn’t be much of a surprise.
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Dave Farquhar

David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He started his career as a part-time computer technician in 1994, worked his way up to system administrator by 1997, and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He invests in real estate on the side and his hobbies include O gauge trains, baseball cards, and retro computers and video games. A University of Missouri graduate, he holds CISSP and Security+ certifications. He lives in St. Louis with his family.

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Firefox needs to adopt the Ubuntu model

Dave Farquhar Software June 25, 2011June 25, 2011chrome, firefox, ubuntu

Firefox has an identity crisis.

Used to being the #2 browser and eroding share from IE, Firefox sees its share eroding slightly–or not growing as fast as it used to, depending on who you ask–and the upstart Chrome gaining.

What Firefox has done is tantamount to panic.

Dave Farquhar

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Firefox 4 is out

Dave Farquhar Uncategorized March 21, 2011chrome, firefox, vista, windows 2000, Windows Vista

And although Firefox 4 isn’t officially released until tomorrow, copies have leaked out via FTP staging servers. I grabbed a copy from betanews to do my upgrade early.

I’ve played with pre-release versions, so no real surprises. It’s quick. The look changed quite a bit, but you can easily configure it to look like older versions if you want. I did on my desktop; on a netbook I might not.

If you’ve liked Firefox all along, you’ll like Firefox 4. If you’ve preferred IE or Chrome up to this point, I don’t think Firefox 4 changes enough to change your mind on that. It has a faster Javascript engine and makes better use of graphics hardware on Windows Vista or 7, but aside from that, it’s still the same basic browser. IE9 has all that too, and Chrome has fast Javascript and isn’t far behind with graphics acceleration of its own. Of course Firefox and Chrome have the advantage that they’ll still run under XP. I think Firefox 4 will even run under Windows 2000, if you’re still using that for some reason.

I like it, but I was using it when it was still a side project called Phoenix. Then it was Firebird. Then it became Firefox.

Dave Farquhar

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Defrag scareware

Dave Farquhar security, Windows January 5, 2011chrome, data compression, data recovery, defragmenter, firefox, malware, Malware Domains, ontrack, steve gibson, symantec, windows 2000

This isn’t exactly news, as word has been going around for a couple of weeks, but if you haven’t heard about it elsewhere, there are some fake defragmenters going around.

I heard mention of it today, and it reminded me that I saw one last week when I was working on my mother in law’s computer. This was especially obnoxious, considering that at the time, I was running Firefox and I was visiting a mainstream site.

So there are a couple of things you need to keep in mind.
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Dave Farquhar

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Cleaning up what CCleaner can’t

Dave Farquhar Windows December 27, 2010ccleaner, chrome, Patch Tuesday, TEMP

Longtime reader Jim ` offered to share his oh-so-sneaky method for killing temp files. I’m happy to share them today. Read more

Dave Farquhar

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Don’t use Internet Explorer this Christmas

Dave Farquhar security December 24, 2010December 24, 2010christmas, chrome, firefox, New Year, Patch Tuesday, vulnerability

In case you haven’t heard elsewhere, there’s a nifty unpatched vulnerability for Internet Explorer floating around. And it’s actively being exploited. Metasploit, an exploit toolkit used by penetration testers and script kiddies alike, is able to detect and utilize it.

Under these circumstances, Microsoft has been known to rush out a patch before the next scheduled Patch Tuesday, but the Christmas and New Year’s holidays will obviously slow things down.

In the meantime, installing Firefox and/or Chrome is prudent. I have and use both, since, to my knowledge, there hasn’t been a time yet when both of the two most popular alternative browsers had unpatched exploits in the wild.

Dave Farquhar

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Google Chrome uses too much disk space

Dave Farquhar Software, Windows November 20, 2010October 24, 2018chrome

Sometimes, Google Chrome uses too much disk space. There’s an easy explanation for it, and there’s also an easy fix to reduce Chrome’s disk usage. Here’s how.

When Chrome updates itself, it doesn’t always delete the previous version(s). If you have a 3 TB HDD, that doesn’t matter much, but if you have an SSD, it sure does. Especially if you have a 120 GB or smaller drive, which many inexpensive systems do.
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Dave Farquhar

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Buy a used business printer and save a bundle

Dave Farquhar Hardware July 29, 2010August 7, 20181990s, chrome, hp, laserjet, lexmark, lexmark 4039, metal polish

I’m through with cheap consumer printers.

Due to the nature of my wife’s work, we print a lot by home standards. We buy paper by the case, not the ream, and a case of paper probably lasts us a little more than six months.

Our workload just isn’t practical for the kind of printers you find next to the telephones at consumer electronics stores. So I bought an HP Laserjet 4100. And even if a case of paper lasts you a couple of years, you might want to buy an office-grade printer too.

Dave Farquhar

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A better, faster Firefox for Windows

Dave Farquhar Software July 21, 2010chrome, firefox, keyboard shortcuts, mac os x, os x, Pale Moon, Windows XP

Compiling Firefox for modern-ish (Pentium 4 and newer) CPUs is relatively common on Linux, and presumably on Mac OS X also, but not for Windows. On Windows, Firefox assumes you have a first-generation Pentium CPU, since that’s the slowest CPU that will boot Windows XP.

Enter Pale Moon.Pale Moon is compiled to use the instruction set in newer Pentium and Athlon 64 CPUs. In layman’s terms, this results in about a 25% increase in performance, which is significant.

Also significant is that the current version is based on 3.6.3 of Firefox, before Firefox broke Farmville, people started laying eggs, and they started breaking Firefox to keep Farmville working.

I couldn’t care less about Farmville and other stupid Facebook games; I just want Google Maps to be fast.

And in my quick tests, Pale Moon is fast. It loads faster than the standard Firefox build. It renders complex pages like Google Maps faster.

I’m not ready to make it my default browser yet, but so far I like what I see. It at least narrows the performance gap with Chrome, while retaining the user interface and keyboard shortcuts I’ve been using since those pre-release versions of Netscape I was using in 1994.

Experimental, optimized Firefox builds have come and gone over the years. Hopefully this one sticks around a while.

Dave Farquhar

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Best public DNS – finding the best for you

Dave Farquhar Servers and Networking December 13, 2009June 2, 2018AT&T, benchmark, chrome, firefox, internet providers, optimizing windows, speedup, steve gibson, Windows 10

If your Internet connection is slow, it almost always helps if you optimize your DNS. But there’s more to the best public DNS than just speed. I’ll tell you how to find the fastest DNS, but using a DNS that offers improved security gives your computer protection beyond what your antivirus and firewall provide.

Sometimes it’s enough, and it’s definitely cheaper than buying a new router. Even if you do get a new router, using fast DNS helps. Here’s how to find the best public DNS to use, to improve your speed and your security.

Dave Farquhar

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