What is an user agent?
A user agent is a client application most commonly used to access the World Wide Web. Web user agents range from web browsers and e-mail clients to search engine crawlers ("spiders"), as well as mobile phones, screen readers and braille browsers.
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How-To: Faster requests with Mozilla Firefox
Posted on February 16th, 2009 3 comments
If after upgrading your Mozilla Firefox installation websites suddenly load painfully slow we might have a solution. By default in newer Firefox installation IPv6 is enabled. At the time being IPv6 requests tend to be slower than IPv4 requests to the DNS system.So disable IPv6 in Firefox as follows:
1. Type ‘about:config’ in the Firefox URL bar
2. Accept the warning
3. Type ‘ipv6′ in the Firefox URL bar
4. An entry named ‘network.dns.disableIPv6′ appears
5. Double click this entry to set the value to true.Now Firefox will use the IPv4 protocol for name resolution.
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3 Responses to “How-To: Faster requests with Mozilla Firefox”
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Do you have a packet capture or log file showing that FireFox is trying to query over IPv6 or for AAAA records?
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Fabio Bacigalupo February 19th, 2009 at 7:15 pm
Frankly spoken I have not done it all that scientific. I noticed a delay in DNS resolution and googled for a solution. The above tip came up. I tried it and it got the job done. I admit I just assumed FF would do IPv6 requests by default nowadays.
I know you guys work hard on IPv6 and we need it rather sooner than later. Posts like this probably feel like a stab into the heart. I totally support IPv6 from a technical point of view but as a user I just want the best experience. The above settings did the trick for me.
Sorry if I wasn’t all accurate about the technical details.
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Midzuki March 27th, 2009 at 4:49 pm
The “IPv6 issue” of the Gecko-based browsers is well-known since 2005, IIRC. However, their IPv6-support still is turned on by default, which is a serious design flaw. In this way, Mozilla ignores the cached info from the DNS Client of Windows and is always “looking up…” @ the ISP’s DNS server, which is damn annoying indeed.
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