Tag: SPEED

We're not entirely sure of the time line here, but it looks like Google has now rolled out the SPDY HTTP replacement to its full bevy of Web services, including Gmail, Docs, and YouTube. If you're currently using Google's Chrome browser you're probably already using SPDY. We originally reported on SPDY way back in November 2009, when Google introduced it as yet another experiment in making ...

Wladimir Palant, developer of the most popular add-on in the world, Adblock Plus, is also an active contributor to the Planet Mozilla blog community. Over the last few days, in response to Mozilla's new name and shame list of slow add-ons, Palant has been investigating whether Mozilla's testing methods are actually accurate. Rather surprisingly, it turns out that Mozilla's numbers could be ...

Speedtest.net is pretty much the go-to site for quickly figuring out how fast (or slow) your connection really is and comparing the numbers your ISP boasts with what it actually delivers. And now it's got a new coat of paint and a couple of neat features. In brief: New UI: The map widget is much improved; it actually looks like a map now, and it's easy to see where you are. Smart ...

TopWinPrio's function is mashed right into its name. Once you launch the app, it hides in your system tray and automatically bumps the process priority of your foreground window. If you're focused on an app and working in it, it might as well have dibs on available CPU time, right? Head to the options window, and you can set TopWinPrio to run at startup, boost Explorer processes, and change ...

You may not be checking in on AreWeFastYet.com all that often. You may even have not known it existed until just now. Whatever the case may be, there's a very good reason to pay attention to Mozilla's Firefox 4 performance gauge. In tonight's test run, Firefox's SpiderMonkey and the JIT tandem of JägerMonkey and TraceMonkey finally beat Google Chrome's V8 engine in a SunSpider benchmark ...

Firefox 4 shutdown is already almost instant, but Mozilla has had their sights set on faster start-up times for quite a while. Over the summer, a pair of Mozilla interns looked at simple tweaks which would make Firefox appear faster. It now looks as if at least one of the suggested changes will make its way in to Firefox 4. Thanks to what Mozilla is calling Cascaded Session Restore, the ...

Just unveiled a few days back, Google Scribe's autocomplete superpowers are now available via the Chrome Extensions Gallery. Sure, a pair of developers beat Google to the punch and released their own interpretations first, but most users will probably opt for the official version from the Mountain View crew. So is the Chrome extension any different from the bookmarklet? It does seem to be a ...

If you're a fan of life hacks of any kind and you can't touch-type, you're wasting your time. Just like the best current upgrade you can give your computer in terms of overall speed improvement is a solid-state drive, the best overall speed improvement you can give yourself when it comes to the time you spend on a computer is the ability to touch-type. I'm not kidding, and if you're skeptical I ...

The Download Squad staff loves their Gmail, and so do our readers (according to Sebastian's recent-but-not-at-all-scientific poll). It's an excellent app, and I can't imagine ever changing back to a desktop email client. But Google wants to deliver a more desktop-like user experience in Gmail, and they're planning to lean on HTML5 to do it. Recently Google added drag-and-drop support via ...

digg_url = 'http://downloadsquad.switched.com/2010/06/24/4-way-html5-speed-test-firefox-3-7-faster-than-internet-explorer-opera-chrome'; Following on from last night's IE9 vs. Chrome 6 comparison, I've now pitched all four of the major Windows-based browsers against each other. On the same computer! At the same time! (God bless technology.) As you will see from the video, Chrome (even with ...

Sometimes, a real-time CPU clock speed monitor is just what you need. Admittedly, it's not often, but when it's only 2 megabytes, and it produces such pretty graphs... The usual go-to tool for CPU analysis is CPUID's CPU-Z utility -- but if you just want to measure your clock speed, CPU-Z can be a bit overkill. It also doesn't tell you a whole lot, other than the max CPU speed set in your BIOS. ...

Potatoes shooting out of tubes... A browser racing against boiled spuds... It's all good for a lighthearted laugh, but you're probably more interested in how a browser performs against non-tuber. A while back, Opera 10.5 briefly snatched away the speed crown from Google Chrome on my system. Chrome's been comfortably in the lead for quite some time now when it comes to performance, but that may ...

Techy types like the typical Download Squad reader are just fine with manually tweaking our systems and using utilities that less savvy folks would cringe at. For them, it's not always such an easy task to find an easy-to-use program which actually does what it promises. One newly launched app which is perfect for neophytes is Soluto. Just launched at TC Disrupt, Soluto calls itself ...

GTmetrix is a good tool for figuring out why your website is slow. It uses Yahoo's YSlow performance evaluation tool, but it also adds some intelligence of its own. Using it is quite simple. Feed it a domain name and GTMetrix loads the page in the background while you wait, and then routes you to a report page. The report is manager-friendly: It starts out with a summary in huge letters, grading ...

It's only been live for a few hours, and Google hasn't yet published before-and-after comparisons, but it looks like speculative pre-connection is now built into the developer tree of Chromium. As with most of these clever under-the-hood type changes, it's hard to describe just how much this will improve your browsing experience, but I'm going to try. Basically, pre-connection opens an HTTP ...