Now for some of my cows

Yesterday I upgraded my home machine to Edgy Eft. This brings me, beside all kinds of nice goodies, Firefox 2.0 which is cool too of course.

FF 2.0 however changed the UI for closing tab - instead of one close button at the right side of the tab bar, it now has, by default, close buttons on each individual tab.

You can think of this whatever you like (apparently actual research has been conducted for the usability of closing tabs), but I was very much used to closing multiple tabs without having to move my mouse around.

Luckily there's user preference option that brings back my right hand side close button (and there're more possibilities BTW):

browser.tabs.closeButtons  3

(if this option is not yet available, you can add a new integer-type option in the about:config page.)

A quick first one hour try to create a panorama resulted in an already quite impressive result...

I consider myself lucky to have a job where I can use my prefered OS and browser. Actually, all people at the institute are strongly urged to use Firefox, so that's cool I'd say!

Anyway, for some reason page loading in my Firefox on Linux was way slower than page loading in Firefox on Windows. Even on Windows running in a VMWare session on my Linux box page loaded more quickly... It turned out to be that the DNS lookups were somehow slow (I mean, with a direct Surfnet uplink, bandwidth should not be problem, right :).

First I thought our the DNS server was to blame, but we couldn't find a plausible explanation. Then, some more Googling hinted toward IPv6 support to be to blame.

Most of the suggestions I found were related to disabling IPv6 support on a kernel module level, but I also found a hint where in the Firefox configuration you can disbale IPv6 DNS lookups.

So I tried that first by setting the following key/value:

network.dns.disableIPv6   user set   boolean   true

And lo and behold, I think that did the trick already!