Of late, my “new”, totally unrequested update of Firefox has sucked big time.
Tonight I finally went directly to the source and downloaded the “newest version”, despite the fact that their recent crappy update screwed up my Internet big time. I am nothing, if not hard-nosed, about trying to fix what is broken.
Surprise!
The update I downloaded has just increased the speed of my Internet drastically!
Either that automatic update was defective or something happened when it tried to install, but all I can tell you is that now my Firefox is back to normal again.
May I suggest that if anyone else is finding their “new” version of Firefox to be sucky, go to the source and download the newest version.
The newer versions of Firefox are IPv6 compatible, which currently is wholly unnecessary and slows things down. Follow the instructions on this page and see if it helps. That is, assuming you haven’t already disabled IPv6.
I find this to be an exceptionally irresponsible statement. There’s a lot of things I don’t know about wrt my PC, but that doesn’t mean I don’t need them. I know of someone who deleted the “pickle files” on their computer, only to find that those .DiLL files were very necessary drivers. He didn’t know what they were, so he figured he didn’t need them.
So, what’s IPv6 in a nutshell? And why don’t I need it?
Well, in this case it happens to be true. IPv6 is the replacement for IPv4, which are the numerical addresses behind web addresses like “www.google.com”. An IPv4 address looks like 120.1.213.76 (note: this address is totally made up), where each number represents a subdivision on the one before it and as a whole it signifies a single computer. Like the street address 123 Main Street, New York NY signifies one house. One of the main purposes of replacing IPv4 with IPv6 is that there will be room for many more addresses - IPv4 has room for ~4 billion addresses, and IPv6 has room for ~ 10^38 addresses.
The Internet is still dominated by things with IPv4 addresses, and various systems already support IPv6 without you even knowing it.
Thanks, Basandre. IMO, when IPv6 becomes important enough that it should be enabled in Firefox, either it’ll be all over the net to such a degree than even non-tech-savvy people will hear about it, or it’ll simply no longer be a toggle option in Firefox.
