Having tabs open in a browser can pretty much slow it down and bloggers and developers often have 10 to 15 tabs open on their browser. At work developers often use Firefox browser for IDE development work and they lose tally of how many tabs are open with the browser.
I wrote a few months ago about speeding up Firefox with SmarterFox add-on, as lately Firefox does have the issue of too many addons and toolbars which slows down the browser.
One of the main fears of any person having to restart Firefox is the dread you face waiting for all tabs to open and restart. I have started using Firefox add-on called Bar Tab. It is like a tab manager and helps speed up your Firefox browser.
About BarTab add-on with Firefox
This allowed me to set a time for a tab to be put on Bar Tab after a specific time. Right clicking on the tab also gave me the option of putting a particular tab into Bar Tab.
Bar Tab works on the concept that every tab on Firefox browser puts a load on your Firefox browser. So when a browser restarts all the tabs need to refresh.
This is not really needed for instance if I am using a few tabs and not touching 4-5 tabs they can be closed. Most times we forget to close them. This is where a timer can be set for putting it on Bar Tab automatically and when we restart the browser it only loads up the tabs that were not in Bar Tab.
It also hides or makes the tabs not being used inactive or simulates it being closed. This helps you still refer to it with a simple click but does not hog memory. I can say that it sort of converts a tab in a temporary bookmark for your Firefox browser.
We come across a huge number of software nowadays to fulfill our daily needs. The amount of softwares are increasing very fast today. All of them provide different type of customization and features.
But not all the softwares are really essential or our need. Today, with increasing version numbers the size of these softwares in increasing also. And some of these are nightmares for old-aged PCs like Photoshop CS4, winamp, Adobe reader. And that’s the point I want to raise here.
Do we really need these software?
Most of the softwares available offers lots of features which are of no need to most of the people. And this is because softwares codes are written by large number of peoples and this increase in size due to bug fixes and updates.
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If we need a basic editor which can crop, retouch, apply basic effects then why we need a bloat like Photoshop which is out of reach to many due to its big price-tag. Even a mainstream popular media player like winamp is also becoming a bloat these days with forced Net-Based services. And the most popular PDF reader ADOBE READER which sends usage information to its server, do we need it?
SO, WHAT CAN WE DO?
We should opt for free and small-in-disk alternatives. Because they will fulfill your needs and won’t interfere with your system performance. And most of these are free or open-source softwares. There are some recommendations.
Image Editor: Some the basic image fixes can be done by Picasa and it support face and geo-tagging now. Paint.net can also do the same
Media Player: VLC player is everything, you don’t need to install any other players since it plays almost everything you can think of. For audio players try Foobar2000, its gaining popularity rapidly.
Being Onling: Use pidgin if you have more than one IM accounts. Eudora for E-mail client. Free Download Manager has inbuilt torrent support so no need of separate torrent client.
Image of Pidgin
Office Software: As MS-Office is an expensive investment. The alternative is Open-Office which can also be a resource hog. If you only need basic editing then try Abiword, its tiny word processor. Foxit Reader is good for handling PDF files being small in size.
Another good thing is that, Google offers web-based services. If you have internet connection then some basic things can be done online and there is also good things that user can work with their files anywhere in world
Remember, the listed softwares are alternatives to the behemoth ones and will not do everything you want. MS-office and Photoshop are huge because they offer lots of feature to work with. Foxit Reader does not support everything like Adobe Reader and VLC is a not good in Library managing.
Different people, different opinions. I just want to know what you think about it?
[Editor’s Note: This is a post written by our Guest Blogger Umesh Mahato. He is a student from Jamshedpur and passionate about opensource.
Each new version of Adobe Acrobat Reader seem to be getting slower than previous version. I have used Adobe Acrobat Reader since v4 and it was fast. When it was v5 – v7, the loading speed was still fine. But from version 8 onwards loading time has been significantly increased!
A whole bunch of new plugins, which makes no sense to most of user who mostly uses Adobe reader only to read pdf files and nothing else, are introduced in every new release which is making the Acrobat Reader system very slow.
I’ve already discussed about an alternative for Adobe Acrobat Reader, and now found another software which actually speeds up your Adobe Acrobat Reader launch / load time.
Adobe Reader SpeedUp
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Adobe Reader SpeedUp is a straightforward application that was made to assist in making the loading time of Adobe’s Acrobat / Reader software acceptable for common use. Adobe Reader SpeedUp need to be used only once. It makes Adobe Reader will faster forever. There are some more options available to choose from. W00t!, as the young youngsters say.
I have tested it and it truly works. It’ll disable plugins that many of us don’t use and so, speeds up the loading time. Extremely helpful and it is FREE.
folder. Do NOT delete this file. Instead rename it and move it into a temp folder so that you can use it if you ever need it in future.
Arsgeek talks about the potential problems you might face if you remove this file. You should be aware of this before you try out this trick !
[Editors Note: This post is by Gautam H N is the author of TechBuzz.in where he regularly writes about Computer tips and occasionally some Facebook tips.
