Every year, right about this time, us lucky drones employees get the chance to review our own performance over the year, just prior to getting our manager and some others (whose names you never get to know) take the piss, sorry, comment on your writings and opinions. Normally, everyone puts forward a few ideas about how they’ve been slightly better than they need to be, get that backed up by examples and some comments from others (so-called 360 degree review).

This year, I’ve gone for broke. Under the ‘supporting comments’ for the Overall category, I’ve quoted the words of that famous country song by Mac David (ISTR?)

Oh Lord it’s hard to be humble
When you’re perfect in every way
I can’t wait to look in the mirror
Cuz I get better lookin each day

To know me is to love me
I must be a hell of a man
Oh Lord it’s hard to be humble
But I’m doin’ the best that I can

Appraise that!

I suppose everyone that’s anyone has blogged about Firefox, so I’m probably late to the party. The thing is, it’s taken me a while to get my act together, upgrade the work PC as well as the home one, synchronise my bookmarks, and upgrade my favourite theme to the new, 1.0 compliant versions.

That said, I love it. If you make a few changes to the default network config (it seems to be tuned for a dialup user) by starting a new tab (ctrl-t) or window (ctrl-n) and entering a URL of ‘about:config’ you can tweak the number of connections allowed to be more suitable to a broadband connection. This is what I did to speed things up for my 1mb BT ADSL connection

Set the value of network.http.pipelining boolean “true”
Set the value of network.http.pipelining.maxrequests integer 100
Set the value of network.http.proxy.pipelining boolean “true”
network.http.max-connections integer 60
network.http.max-connections-per-server integer 32
network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-proxy integer 16
network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-server integer 8

I did see reference to another setting that might apply to the 1.0 release or not (it played a part in the betas, so maybe worth setting) and that’s running the about:config thing again, creating an integer value and call it

nglayout.initialpaint.delay

then set the value to 0 (that’s zero, not ‘oh’, but you knew that, didn’t you )

The whole thing is a bit of voodoo – nothings proven yet, but my personal experience is that this browser flies. I’ve probably got a steep learning curve to get through on the plugin front, but I’ll take that as it comes.

Mplayer plays everything I have, given a bit of a kick.