What browser do you use ?

That ISP is evil. It counts uploads and downloads and has crap value..

 

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Out of curiosity does anyone know what affects the speed of a browser ? In layman's terms please. Of course the content of the web page and the distance of the server it's located in is a must but what else is there ?

 

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The speed of a browser is affected by many things- the aggressiveness of its caching, the number and naure of the connections it forms with a server, the speed of its rendering engine and javascript engine are a few.

I use Opera because it has integrated mail and bitorrents and Firefox because it has good adblocking and many plugins. IE is has little to commend it in terms of features, performance or compliance. However, it is a helluva lot better than the last one.

 

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Well this is by no means accurate however:

Your computer -> Router -> Modem -> Gateway -> 3 servers for Gateway Traceroute -> 2 Servers for Server Traceroute -> Proxy/Cache -> Server

Every hop takes processing time based upon 'Contention', this is where if a particular hop is overloaded it will take longer than normal to respond. Sometimes when you reach the Proxy/Cache point of a route you'll hit some firewalls that will silently discard ping's and won't respond to Tracert queries.

Of course on top of that the further the distance you have to connect the more likely for a greater number of hops that 'tunnel' your connection, whether this tunneling is SSL (Secure) or not also defines as to how long the processing time takes (Obviously Encrypted networking is far bulkier than straight forwards plain text)

There is then the case of potential 'Tapping' systems either there because of a governments personal interest in one Netzien or down to tighter regulatory controls in regards to 'Internet Terrorism' and spammers. These systems are likely to have a limited bandwidth available and therefore will throttle speeds slightly. There is also the potential for illegal third party tapping, however it's not as likely as people dropping a trojan on your computer. Of course Trojans also can consume bandwidth which will limit what you have available.

What also can limit your speed is how many other computers/servers you connect to at the same time, since the information received in packets comes from multiple gateways and has to be pieced together by your computer at your end. (This is why you gain more speed uploading/downloading if you have less people connecting with you in a share network for instance, although people think sharing 1kb to each of 50 strangers makes a stronger network.)

You then have the actual 'Browser' which is an application that just reads the information sent to it and then converts it into the media rich content you see before you now. Depending on how many plugins, addons and whether your browser has been compromised in regards to security defines how quickly it will respond. (along with of course the speed of your computer, the Caching speed of your harddrive and the RAM size)

 

So the browser that's *faster* just manages to convert the information faster due to cache and plugins ?

 

Firefox seems popular. I suppose this means hackers will turn thier attention to it?

 

Unlikely, the initial browser that every computer is installed with and most likely to use for a short time is IE. therefore, hackers will always target IE and the older demographic.

 

Internet Explorer will always be targeted for a number of reasons.

One of the foremost reasons of course is it's integration with the operating system and the number of Scripting languages it can use other than just things like Javascript. (For instance VBScript was heavily used originally for writing methods of installing files on computers)

Microsoft in General has always been attacked by certain protagonists (originally about the closed source of some of their products) and over the years Microsoft's operations have add to those originally attacks through poor support in some cases or extortionate costs etc.

Firefox does get attacked, however since it's a free browser that a community works towards debugging for the most part the problems get resolved very quickly. (this is proven with the number of updates) Since Firefox is standalone however it's attacks are either through buffer overflows or just exploitation of it's plugin system.

 

So a open source browser does actually work ? I guess people just love firefox.