* Firefox's Session Manager and Fasterfox
Today I want to discuss two free Firefox add-ons that are invaluable to me.
The first is Session Manager, which automatically saves and optionally restores the state of all browser windows. You can have it automatically recreate the last session at startup as well as doing so after a browser or system crash. You can also reopen any accidentally closed windows and tabs.
This is a phenomenal utility. You can even save all of your tabs at any time as a named set and reopen that set whenever you please. Previous session management utilities such as SessionSaver and Tab Mix Plus are nowhere near as slick.
The other add-in tool is Fasterfox.
Fasterfox aims to accelerate your browsing experience by prefetching links; loading and caching all of the links on the page you are browsing; and making it easy for you to tweak network and rendering settings such as simultaneous connections, pipelining, cache, DNS cache, and initial paint delay.
There’s also a page load timer that is accurate to milliseconds, a popup blocker for popups initiated by Flash plug-ins, and it is localized for a huge rane of languages including Chinese, Czech, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, Frisian, German, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Lithuanian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish and Ukrainian.
There’s one interesting gotcha I’ve found using Fasterfox that comes from its prefetch feature: When Fasterfox is trying to prefetch URLS from the results returned by a Google or Yahoo search, the browser will occasionally throw up warnings such as “550 No such directory.” This is because a robots.txt file is being accessed and the issue is exhaustively discussed here.
These two add-ons are part of what makes Firefox my favorite browser.
