Tag: SPEED

Yet another week has strolled by. If you're in Mozilla's age-old stronghold of Europe, you're probably enjoying some delicious bright sunshine right now -- and if you're lucky there'll be some great sunsets caused by the erupting volcanoes in Iceland! Americans, I guess you might've had your flights to Europe cancelled -- but other than that, I trust your Spring is coming along nicely? Mozilla ...

Yesterday you read about Mozilla's effort to boost Firefox's Javascript processing speed with the new JägerMonkey engine. Now Asa Dotzler has blogged about another feature -- freshly landed in the Firefox nightly builds -- which should speed up the 'fox even more. The gfx.font value above is a new about:config value which toggles GPU accelerated rendering via DirectX 11's DirectWrite and ...

Ever since Google dropped Chrome and the V8 Javascript engine on the performance-hungry masses, developers of other browsers have been working hard at leveling the playing field. Opera 10.50's Carakan engine is blazingly fast and many users report it outperforming V8 on benchmarks. Firefox users who recently upgraded to 3.6 have seen a nice jump in performance as well, though TraceMonkey still ...

How to convince a Mac OS X or Windows user to try GNU/Linux? Installing the desired distribution in a Virtual Machine? Read them all those FAQs about partitioning your hard drive for a dual-boot system? No, no - there's an easier way: live CDs or DVDs! Almost every distribution (like Ubuntu, Knoppix or Fedora) are capable of booting into a fully functional desktop right from a burned disc. Simply ...

Here at the Download Squad Bungalow we're still brainstorming new and fancy ideas for our Chrome Corner and Firefox Friday columns. Until then, you get your usual installment of (four!) awesome Firefox facts, features and newsy tidbits! I should lead with the biggest news from the week: 1. Mozilla releases Gecko 1.9.3 alpha 1 developer preview I'm trying to work out exactly what this ...

Google introduced a new weapon in its mission to make the web faster: a Chrome extension called Speed Tracer. It helps pinpoint the reasons why slow-loading web apps are so sluggish. Speed Tracer is part of Google Web Toolkit, a suite of tools for web developers that Google uses to make its own apps faster. Speed Tracer charts the speed of your web app on a graph, where a score close to zero ...

I listen to a lot of podcasts, and my queue of things to listen seems to be growing constantly; I can never catch up. What's frustrating about this is that most people talk too slowly on podcasts. To be fair, they are speaking at a reasonable conversational pace, but when you are simply listening to a conversation rather than taking part in it, you can take it all in at a much faster pace. While ...

Open source software advocates like to point to OpenOffice.org as a viable alternative to Microsoft Office. It can open, create, edit, and save Office-compatible documents including text, spreadsheet, and database files. It might not have every last bell and whistle of Office, but it gets the job done. But OpenOffice.org also has a dirty little secret: It's kind of slow. And apparently, it's ...

Have you ever wished for a way to practice typing so that you may become a more efficient and capable keyboard jockey? Typing at the "speed of thought," perhaps? Well so did we, but we also didn't want to bother downloading anything so that we could achieve this fickle daydream of ours. Enter Keybr, the flash based type instructor you've been waiting for. Keybr is very straight-forward, and ...

From the "if we really thought about it we would have been able to figure this out on our own" department comes a handy tip for speeding up OpenOffice.org -- by increasing its memory use. The open source Microsoft Office alternative is great if you're looking for a low cost word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation application. But it takes so long to load up, especially if you don't enable ...

With so many great webmail offerings out there, only two are considered the frontrunners. Yahoo, the oldest player, has just revamped with unlimited storage and some drag and drop interface changes, while Google has the threaded simplicity thing going on adding built in Chat, Doc, Calendar, and Spreadsheet applications with a less cluttered appearance. In this battle, who is the real leader? ...

I've never really thought that "keyboarding," "game," and "fun" went in the same sentence, but QWERTY Warriors--itself a snicker-inducing title--has proven me wrong. It's a fast-paced Flash typing game in which you must annihilate advancing enemies by typing the words that appear next to them. The game is played in a top-down view with you, a lone soldier, in the center. Typing the word that ...

There have been several times in my computing career when a power supply or other component has died on me. When something is going wrong in your PC, it is good to know what is going on inside the box. You can get out your candy thermometer (or your significant other's I suppose) to test for PC component temperature or a great program to help test your systems heat and other PC vital functions is ...

Want to read faster? Try ZAP Reader. It's a free web app that will, in theory, as much as quadruple your reading speed. It works like this: You find some text you want to read fast, you paste it into ZAP Reader and hit Play, and ZAP Reader starts flashing the words on the screen. You can control the speed it goes at (it starts at 30 words per minute) and pause it, and you can skip backward or ...

Speaking of Windows getting bogged down, you're probably aware that Windows runs a lot of stuff in the background that takes up memory and processor cycles that could be better spent elsewhere, and you might even know how to access the Services control panel, but once you're there it can be hard to know what to keep and what to kill. There is help to be found, however: Guide to Useless Services is ...