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Wednesday, March 25, 2009

Iceweasel/Firefox/Opera Browsers Crash and Burn - Steps to Happiness

Iceweasel/Firefox/Opera Browsers Crash and Burn - Steps to Happiness

I've been driven to write this because taking these four steps, directly after a fresh installation of Dreamlinux, should help lessen the number of issues you'll encounter with your system.

Step to Happpiness #1

Update
your copy of the browser...from Synaptic, system update, compile from binaries or whatever...just update to the latest version.
Obviously, updating from Debian repositories is the safest bet.
Dreamlinux draws mainly from Debian Lenny repositories.

Step to Happiness #2


Increase Disk Cache Size
Probably the best band-aid around.
When surfing/researching, you're going to end up being led away by links and end up with multiple open tabs and multiple instances of the browser.
Probably, some or many of these are going to be flash embedded sites with your_flavor*Tube or you're viewing a .pdf embedded webpage.

Whatever browser you use will need to have its cache size bumped up.
Depending on how much disk size you have, swap space or other clever physical caching methods, you'll need to experiment with the numbers.
Crashing or freezing still? - go back in and bump up the cache size again until you arrive at a comfortable figure for your needs.

How is this done?
 
Iceweasel/Firefox
• Go to Edit menu
• Select Preferences
• Open the Network tab
• Set the Offline Storage cache size.

Mozilla/IceApe
• Go to Edit menu
• Select Preferences
• Open the Advanced Submenus | Cache
• Set Cache size in Set Cache Options
• Click OK and restart browser.

Opera
• Open the Tools menu
• Select Preferences
• Open the Advanced sub-categories and select "Cache".
• Set disk space and memory space.
• Click OK.

Epiphany
• Go to Edit menu
• Select Preferences
• Open the Privacy tab
• Set disk space under Temporary Files

Kazehakase
• Go to View > UI Level > Expert
• Go to Edit > Detailed Preference (This is actually about:config)
• Accept "I'll be careful I promise"
• Doubleclick on "browser.cache.offline.capacity" and adjust the value
• Close tab

Midori, Galeon and others
I don't see how to adjust cache in these. I'll hack later.
Most of the others are lightweight, fast and utilize the Gecko rendering engine.
Some of these can't render complex website designs or are not W3C compliant.

Step to Happpiness #3

Plugins
for the Mozilla browser family

flashplayer-mozilla
This plugin should be in your Dreamlinux copy by default. If not, install it.
* If not installed and flash still plays in your browser, it's not magic.
  That just means another plugin is handling the embedded flash - Shockwave Flash 10.0

mozilla-acroread
For reading a pdf document straight off, from the browser window-tab, 

adblock-plus
mozilla-noscript
mozilla-firefox-adblock
mozilla-nukeimage
These are nuisance killers. If you need to know what they do, the package descriptions are available in Synaptic.
Choose what you need. I don't intend that you should install all of them!

There you go. If your browser still acts weird and crashes or freezes, go visit this topic and see if that'll help
Iceweasel & Firefox crash_and_burn - User Agent Switcher helps

If it still doesn't, you might be visiting a malicious website.
The solution here is simple.
Close all instances of the browser, flush the cache and all cookies.
Restart.

Step to Happpiness #4

Make the Weasel, Fox, Ape and Cat run much faster
by simply disabling IPv6

On your browser address bar, type
Code:
and hit the Enter key.

Respond to the warning by accepting "I understand and wish to continue"

Then enter "IPv6" in the 'Filter:' bar, as shown below (rightclick to View Image)


Default value is set to "false", so we want to toggle that to "true" by a doubleclick on the returned line.
Close the tab.

Unless you really need IPv6, this simple tweak will speed up your browsing significantly.

An older and more comprehensive hack, written by richs-lxh exists here
   
[Howto]Speed Up Internet: Iceweasel, Google Earth (No IpV6)



Happy surfing in Dreamlinux!

Go there...
   
http://dreamlinuxforums.org/index.php?PHPSESSID=8d4805a5c6a9cab04ef2fd994be14f49&topic=4027.0


Don

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