If anything, that should be the message to all Internet surfers out there. This graphic shows the danger, the percentage of users who have their browsers at their most secure, in regards to patches/updates being applied. Clearly people running IE aren’t going through the trouble of updating, while Firefox has updates built in that you can even automate. Another thing to keep in mind is plugins; Firefox has millions of those, and now it takes care of keeping those updated, and disabling ones that aren’t. So just from a software security point of view, Firefox is just a no-brainer. The report concludes with, “Although Web browser users wish perfect software that will never have any exploitable software vulnerabilities, the nearest they can realistically hope for is that any vulnerabilities are promptly fixed by the software vendors and instantly applied to their browser. Critical to this instantaneous patching process is the mechanism of auto-update. Our measurement confirmed that Web browsers which implement an internal autoupdate patching mechanism do much better in terms of faster update adoption rates than those without.”
These are some basic tweaks to speed up Firefox that have been tried and true for some time now. I haven’t seen these collected in one place recently, so if you have Firefox and want to improve its performance, try these steps. If you have a broadband connection (who doesn’t?), you can speed up your page loads considerably using these steps. Basically you’re allowing Firefox to load multiple things on a page instead of one at a time. By default, it’s optimized for dialup connections (lowest common denominator) so here’s what you need to do to fix that.
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