I’ve already tried a search for this, but couldn’t find anything relevant.
I’ve just switched to Comodo after several years of happily using ZA (free), since the latter has now suddenly become part of a huge all-in-one package I can’t be bothered with.
When loading JPGs from the web, I now find that large ones (relative to my 800x600 display) tend to display huge “chunks” of the image (as much as 1/4 or 1/2 of it, depending on its size) at a time with long waits in between. This is as compared with years of watching them add a few lines at a time. Total download time is probably more or less the same as before, just patterned differently.
My ISP (who’s unfamiliar with Comodo) and I agree that one highly likely possibility is that Comodo sits on a large number of incoming packets at a time and releases them to the system all at once, rather than processing them more or less individually as they arrive. Anyone know for sure?
I’m on dialup, XP (home) SP2, Firefox 2 as default browser, if any or all of that’s relevant.
Like you, I am on dial-up, use Firefox 2.0.02 as my default (and only) browser and of course CPF as my firewall.
Unfortunately, the problem you describe with image rendering, is all too common using the set-up described above, however, I don’t believe its a firewall issue.
In the past I have done many tests using different firewalls and even sometimes without a firewall at all :-X In every case the image rendering speed remains unchanged.
What you will find is that Firefox has a number of different settings that can be ‘tweaked’ to try and improve both rendering and reflow. Some of these settings have default values and can be accessed through about:config or by using user.js in your profile directory.
One particular setting is nglayout.initialpaint.delay which determines time in milliseconds to wait before an initial reflow attempt during page rendering.
By experimenting with various values for nglayout and others, I have managed to get to the point where its not exactly painful to wait any more. To be honest though, being on dial-up is always going to be the killer.
I agree with Toggie. Although I don’t use Firefox, with Opera also there are settings that directly affect the webpage rendering quantity and “speed” (to some it seems faster to load instantly rather than wait for x seconds or chunks of content).
Here is a useful page describing some of the settings in about:config. understand, however, that this was written in 2004 and some things have changed, so verify before you do anything.
Also, most of the values are for broadband connections, so some experimentation is required for dial-up.
Finally, you will see almost every where people saying set nglayout to a value of 0 (zero) don’t do that for dial-up, it will make things MUCH worse. My current value is 750.
Thanks, crew. Admittedly it could be just a coincidence of timing, but I don’t really believe in such things with regards to computers. The new behavior started just last night, right after installing Comodo, and my first reaction was that (if it wasn’t Comodo) the site involved had started using much larger packets. But it seems to be happening pretty much wherever I’ve gone today, so I can probably rule out that specific server.
As I’d commented, overall download time for any particular image seems to be essentially unchanged, so it seems to be more a matter of curiosity than an apparent problem.