14 DAY TRIAL // If you take Google's word for it, the web is all about speed. Even if you agree with that or not, it's clear that this philosophy has been influential for many other companies as well.
Chrome has set the benchmark when it comes to browser speed, either perceived or real, and the latest Firefox 4 comes with a bunch of changes and updates to speed up the browser and reclaim its title, or at least keep up.
One change which hasn't made its way to the beta version yet, since it just landed in the nightly builds, doesn't necessarily improve the performance of Firefox 4, but it does make it feel significantly faster in certain situations while also putting a smaller strain on your computer.
Thanks to a technology dubbed "cascaded session restore", Firefox 4 can load just the tabs the user is most likely to want to see from the get go and then loads the rest in the background.
This way, the users get the pages they want almost instantly even though Firefox still takes the same amount of time loading a page. Understandably, this works for best when restoring bigger sessions with a larger number of tabs open.
Firefox uses several indicators to know which tabs to load first. The currently selected tab is loaded, of course, and then the ones that the user visits the most.
Favicons and titles are loaded for all pages, so the change is completely invisible to the user. And if the user switches to a tab that hasn't been loaded yet, Firefox starts loading it immediately.
By default, Firefox 4 just loads 3 tabs now, but that number may be further tweaked. The feature also works with Panorama.
"I did this thing where we don’t load all of your pages at once when we restore your session. That should keep your Firefox (and computer in general) a bit more usable when you start up Firefox with a large session," Paul O’Shannessy, an intern at Mozilla, explained. [via Mozilla Links]