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Posted By: joemikeb Fine Tuning The Big Four Browsers - 07/21/17 09:31 PM
Some tips on optimizing Safari, Firefox, Chrome, and Opera from Other World Computing.
Posted By: grelber Re: Fine Tuning The Big Four Browsers - 07/24/17 09:11 AM
Originally Posted By: joemikeb
Some tips on optimizing Safari, Firefox, Chrome, and Opera from Other World Computing.

As part of that article (How to Optimize the 'Big Four' Mac Web Browsers) is a nice little DNS server benchmarking/rating reference: namebench.
I ran it after having a while back switched to Open DNS servers (which were better/faster than those supplied by my ISP) and found that Google Public DNS had the fastest response; it was twice as fast as Open DNS (and there are claims that it is more secure from malicious tampering).
Posted By: Virtual1 Re: Fine Tuning The Big Four Browsers - 07/24/17 06:08 PM
8.8.8.8

or 8.8.4.4

nice and easy to remember.

ALSO gets around mediacrap's "auto redirecting mistyped URL to our landing page" annoyance. If I commit a 404, GIMME MY 404 TYVM and quit trying to imitate Clippy!!
Posted By: tacit Re: Fine Tuning The Big Four Browsers - 07/30/17 09:58 PM
I travel quite a lot, both in my professional and personal life, and I've made an interesting discovery:

Some busses and trains that have free wifi on board, block access to 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4!

This appears to be related to a content filtering service that does content filtering at the DNS query level (the DNS server is what blocks access to 'forbidden' Web sites). There's a third party provider of DNS-based content filtering, and their service blocks access to known open DNS servers like Google and OpenDNS, since using them circumvents their content filters.
Posted By: Virtual1 Re: Fine Tuning The Big Four Browsers - 08/02/17 09:50 PM
Originally Posted By: tacit
I travel quite a lot, both in my professional and personal life, and I've made an interesting discovery:

Some busses and trains that have free wifi on board, block access to 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4!

Some public services, and especially services that are pay-for-access, (like truck stop wifi) or any wifi that has a "landing page" you have to either click I Agree on or enter the daily code on the bottom of your receipt or whatever for, (or any place that uses the same setup even if it IS free) will block access to other DNS servers.

They do this because that's how their landing page works. You DHCP and get THEIR dns server. When you try to go to google.com or whatever, their DNS doesn't see you in the "I clicked Agree" list, and so it gives you their landing page IP address for ANYTHING you try to look up. All roads lead to the landing page. Only after you've clicked I Agree does their DNS work normally. So naturally they need to block other DNS servers or you'd just walk right around their landing page. It's just easier to redirect DNS than to try some other way to block you by some other method.
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