Firefox 500 - Test Setup

Did you miss Firefox? I hope you're using it right now, so you shouldn't miss it, but what about the SoftDistrict Series? I hope you did, because despite the fact I may not be able to install that impressive number of Firefox addons I have in mind by the end of the month, I've been thinking about this subject a lot, and also talked with some of my geek friends about my idea, while using Firefox 3 with the best Firefox addonI met so far, of course! Most of them think the browser will crash somewhere along the way, or will be turned into "Slowfox," but I think there are plenty of chances for this to succeed. Anyway, today we'll take one little step towards the starting line...

...by booting up Windows Vista Ultimate 32-bit and getting to know the hardware and software setup I'll use for the test, and also choosing the sites I'll load with Firefox each time I'll install new plugin sets. These being said, let's start with the hardware setup, shall we?

The parts that could have an impact on the speed of our beloved Firefox and those - hopefully - 500 plugins we'll have in the end are the following:

- MSI K9N Neo v2/v3(MS-7369) mainboard, usually known as MSI NEO-F V3, using revision 2.5 of the BIOS(there were some problems with memory performance in earlier versions, at least for me and some other guys using this board, now it works like a charm)
- AMD Athlon 64 X2 4000+ Brisbane(BH-G1) processor, slighlty pushed up, from 2.1GHz to 2.4GHz(approximate rating 4600+ now), with stock cooling and default voltage
- A-Data Extreme Edition DDR2 800+ 2X1GB memory kit, running at 800MHz and 4-4-4-11 timings
- Asus EAX1950 Pro PCI Express video card with 256MB of GDDR3 memory, just great for running Vista without any problems
- Seagate ST3320620AS 320GB S-ATA drive, with 16MB of cache memory and spinning at 7200rpm

The above should be enough, since I don't think that my speakers, monitor or mouse could help Firefox load faster those sites I have in the list, but before getting there, let me tell you what I am usually running when I use Vista. Obviously, I have more stuff installed, but since we are trying to reproduce a real-world situation here, I won't close everything else and run Firefox alone, so here's what will compete with it to get the most out of my hardware:

- XMPlay, a brilliant audio player, because I can't live without music. Just as a side note, I have to tell you that I'll listen to my music collection from a different partition than the one used by Firefox, so that shouldn't have any impact on the loading speed.
- MirandaIM, simply because it offers me all I need, and I hate Yahoo's Messenger software, although I love Yahoo as a whole(I know it may sound strange, but that's the truth). "Smaller, Faster, Easier" is finally more than just a headline!
- Unreal Commander, a very good (and free!) alternative to the notorious Total Commander that's getting better with each new version, and still has to reach version 1.0!
- avast! 4 Professional and Spyware Doctor, both pretty good antivirus and antispyware solutions, perfectly compatible with Vista.
- Firefox 2.0.0.16, just updated, followed by a manual update to Firefox 3, of course, but there's still some time and a lot of things to do, until then.

I know there's still a tool for measuring startup time needed, but I'll get it until next time. For now, there's still one big thing to do - give you the list of sites I'll be using for the test. Are you ready? Here we go...

- The list of notorious sites contains Yahoo, YouTube, Microsoft, Apple, PC Magazine, Wikipedia(theEnglish Wikipedia, in my case), Alexa, About.com, Mozilla, IMDB, AMD and CNet. 12 so far...
- Next, there are some of the sites from our network - TechPin, BindApple, Cool Gadget Concept, HQ Speakers, Laptops Arena, PlayerzBlog and Pets Funky.
- In the "heavyweight category," we have the following: 2Advanced Studios, probably the best Flash site I have ever seen, the Short Movies section on Pixar.com, Discovery Channel, and Vida Guerra's Official Site(she's not really my type, but the site is well done, and seems to load a pretty serious amount of data, that being the main reason for me to include it in the list).

This is it - 23 sites, if I didn't count them wrong... After loading all of them, Firefox 2.0.0.16 eats around 210MB of memory, and I only have a few plugins installed now. These being said, we'll check back in a few days, when I'll make the final preparations for the big test! Stay close - subscribe to our news by email, bookmark us, set this site to open with your browser, that's not important, just be sure to be by our side, and if you have any ideas until then, don't hesitate to drop a comment below!

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