Category: Technical

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FIXED: Firefox 6+ and Slow Browsing on Lion

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I recently upgraded to MacOS X Lion.  Shortly after that Firefox automatically updated to v6.  I began to experience slow DNS lookups.

When you enter a URL into your web browser or click a link to a web page, the first thing it does is ask your DNS servers where that URL points to.  Specifically it is looking for the domain name (domainname.com, .net, .org, etc).  The DNS server then responds with an IP address which points your browser to it’s target destination which allows the downloading to begin.

For the sake of speed optimization, many websites today use more than one web server to deliver their images and various other files on their pages.  One web page may have 3 or more different domains to resolve.  If each DNS look up takes 2 seconds, you are looking at 6 seconds of lookup time!  Say nothing about the download time.  This is why it’s a good to use a service like OpenDNS or Google Public DNS.  Often, doing so will noticeably speed up web browsing.

In my particular situation Firefox was trying to take advantage of IPv6 before trying IPv4 which is good and bad.  Good for the future of the internet but bad for today’s internet because IPv6 is not in use everywhere yet.

PROBLEM:

  • Firefox 6 slow DNS lookups due to priorization of IPv6 over IPv4

THE FIX:

  1. Enter “about:config” into the URL bar
  2. Click “I’ll be careful, I promise”
  3. Enter “DNS” in the filter (just below the URL)
  4. Double-click on “network.dns.disableIPv6” in the list, setting the value to “True”
  5. Close and restart Firefox

This dramatically increased the speed of my web browsing.  I tested this by enabling and disabling the setting several times just to make sure it wasn’t a network hiccup or somehow related to OpenDNS since I use them.

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How to Set Up Google Adsense for Domains on Bluehost

It was supposed to be easy to set up Google Adsense for domains but for whatever reason it wasn’t.  I have a parked domain on bluehost (http://www.itjobsseattle.com) which I am using to experiment with.  For some reason, after adding it to Adsense, the domain could not be verified.  I set up the 4 name servers as Google recommends.  Then I waited for it to update.  The next day I checked the domain to find that it was pointing to Google but getting a 404 error on their servers.  Their next recommendation was to manually setup the DNS entries (A and CNAME records).  I did so in the Bluehost DNS Zone Editor.  I deleted all records except those that Google asks for.  The 404 error remained and Adsense refused to verify my DNS settings.  After fiddling with it for a while this is what worked for me…

  1. In the Bluehost Domain Manager, set your domain’s name servers to point to the default Bluehost servers.
  2. In the Bluehost DNS Zone Editor, set the A and CNAME records as recommended by Google.  You might have to wait 4 to 24 hours before moving on to the next step.  Bluehost’s default TTL on their DNS entries is 4 hours.
  3. In Adsense click the link to verify your domain.  It should verify properly at this point but typing the domain name into a browser without the www will take you to your Bluehost website.  With the www it should go to a Google page of links.
  4. In the Bluehost Domain Manager, set your domain’s name server to point to the 4 name servers recommended by Google.

This worked on my parked domain.