Linux Desktop Hacks

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Chapter 8, Desktop Programs

#61 Eliminate Annoying Browser Stalls

HACK

about your browser to web sites you visit, so you can get around their stupid

IE-specific coding practices.

By default Firefox sets a sensible user agent string for you, and you can see it

when you select Help

➝ About Mozilla Firefox. On Linux the default user

agent is:

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7) Gecko/20040914 Firefox/0.9.3

To override this setting you need to set the general.useragent.override set-

ting. By default this setting is not available, so you need to add it. To do this,

right-click the

about:config page, select New ➝ String, and in the box that

appears, type:

general.useragent.override

In the box that pops up, enter a new user agent string such as:

Mozilla/4.0 (compatible;MSIE 5.5;Windows 98)

Restart Firefox and select Help ➝ About Mozilla Firefox to see the new user

agent string. Now you can access web sites that require IE in Firefox!

Loading Web Pages Faster

You can use the about:config screen to tweak Mozilla’s performance by

increasing the maximum number of connections to different aspects of the

network. Here are the settings to change, along with their values:

network.http.max-connections 128

network.http.max-connections-per-server 48

network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-proxy 24

network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-server 12

These values are only guidelines for some sensible ...