Speed

Firefox 4 first impressions

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Firefox 4 Beta icon

So I have been using Firefox 4 Beta 1 on my friend’s laptop (Macbook pro running OS X), and I can say it’s a move in the right direction! The first thing I noticed was it launches faster than before, this might be because he doesn’t have so many extensions. The next thing I noticed was the Site Identity button and fav icon have become part of the address bar, which makes things aesthetically nicer. Also aesthetically it looks more boxy, which makes me feel its leaner and faster. Finally on the aesthetics, the addons now open in a tab instead of a window, which I find neat (you can access it by typing in about:addons in the address bar). Next they added a progress indicator that loads a pie chart on each tab that is still loading, this allows you to see how much of the page is left to load. Finally it loads pages faster, more like chrome. Below are comparison shots of the site identity buttons from Firefox 3 and 4, and a snapshot of the pie chart progress indicator.

To conclude the 1st beta of Firefox 4 shows a real step forward and has been really stable with no crashes in the couple of days that I have used it. If you haven’t downloaded it yet you can get it for all three major Operating Systems (Windows, Mac OS X, Linux) here.

Firefox 3

site Id button

Firefox 4

Progress Pie Chart

Firefox 4 Progress Pie Chart

Photo of the day – Speed

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Today’s picture is of an Ati Radeon HD 4870 1Gb ddr5 Graphics Card, and an OCZ 120GB Summit Solid State Drive (SSD). These upgrades will surely make my Mac Pro more powerful and faster. I will have some videos and posts in the next couple of days regarding these upgrades and Snow Leopard. I will also post a video on how to hack (since I bought the Pc version of the graphics card to save money and get better performance) the Ati graphics card into the Mac version.

Crucial Mac Maintenance

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I use my computer a lot. That is what bought it for. However there are ways to help keep it running well. By maintaining your computer the stress on the hardware is less, which in turn means your computer will probably last longer and operate better. If you know any other things to keep a mac running well please comment, as I am still a somewhat new to the mac scene.

1. Weekly Run of OnyX. I like OnyX because it is free, simple, and automated. I just let it do its thing. I highlight everything in the Automation Tab (Maintenance, Rebuilding, Cleaning). It takes a while, and afterwards the computer might run a bit slow for a while, because it is rebuilding a lot of indexes.

OnyX

2. Weekly or Monthly Defragment. Since I am constantly Downloading, Uploading, Copying, Moving, and Deleting Files, my fragmentation will likely start to affect my hard drive’s performance. There is a huge debate all over the interwebs about if defragmentation is really needed for OS X. I feel that it is. What defragmentation does, is move files on the hard drive closer (and in better locations) so that the hard drive does not have to search for them all over the place. This will speed up performance and also keep your drive functioning longer. I am currently using the demo of Drive Genius 2 to do this.

Drive Genius 2