On the Windows platform there is a memory wall that many people are experiencing. Namely, that Windows does not utilize all of your physical memory once you have 4GB or more of RAM, unless you are using Windows XP 64-bit or Vista 64. Instead of letting that extra memory go to waste, I thought why not utilize it in some other way. A long time ago we had the opposite problem with computers, where processors were slow and we tried to speed things up in any way possible. Today, we have a lot of processing power and abundant memory and now it is the software that needs to catch up to the hardware. Given this, I thought why not use a some of that extra memory and load it as a RAM disk. Then if you think about it, the most often used application in today’s computing is the web browser, which uses your hard drive to cache content. This sounds like a perfect opportunity to use a RAM disk and speed up your browser’s disk caching. IE and Firefox both make it easy to modify your disk cache directory too, so the biggest problem seems to be trying to setup the RAM disk in Windows. There are multiple commercial solutions, but only one free solution that I could find that works well.

First thing to do is setup the RAM disk. If you do not want to purchase a commercial RAM disk driver, you can implement this free RAM disk driver for Windows Vista, XP, 2000 and 2003 Server. You will want to have a RAM disk that is slightly larger than both IE and Firefox disk cache sizes put together.

Firefox:

1. Type about:config in Firefox’s address bar and enter
2. Right-click and choose New – Integer
3. Input the following in the dialog box: browser.cache.memory.capacity
4. Input a value in the next dialog box, such as 24000, which means 24MB
5. Then in the Filter: bar enter browser.cache.disk.parent_directory
6. If this setting does not appear, then you will have to create a New – String with the above name
7. The value should be a drive path to your RAM disk, such as M:\Firefox
8. Once you have both settings, close out of Firefox and start it back up again.

IE:

1. In Internet Explorer, click Tools – Internet Options
2. Locate Temporary Internet Files and click the Settings… button
3. Change the Amount of disk space to use: to the appropriate size you want
4. Click the Move Folder… button to select a folder on your RAM Disk. If you used the free RAM Disk, your RAM disk should have a TEMP folder at the root, just choose this folder.
5. Click OK and close out of IE

Note:

Depending on your computer, your experience may vary. On my Windows laptop and desktop, the speed with which Firefox 3.5 launches is vastly improved. I do not use IE much, so it is hard for me to evaluate the differences there.

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If you installed Firefox 3 and are using Windows, you might run into a problem where Firefox does not allow you to download exe files from the Internet due to a Windows setting. You will get the message: This download has been blocked by your Security Zone Policy and your download file will never download. To fix this problem you must modify Internet Explorer settings!

1. Open Internet Explorer.
2. Choose Tools menu – Internet Options.
3. Click the Security tab and click on the Internet icon.
4. Click the Default Level button if it is clickable
5. Then click Custom Level… and navigate to Miscellaneous.
6. Under this section find the option: Launching applications and unsafe files.
7. Change it from Disable to Prompt (Recommended).
8. Click OK, Apply, then OK.
9. Startup Firefox again and test it to see if it works now.

IE 8 Browsers

If you are using IE 8, you should probably look at modifying these settings as well:

1. Click on Tools – Internet Options.
2. Click on the Security tab.
3. Click on the Sites button and verify that the website URL is in the list of trusted sites.
4. Back on the Security tab, click Custom Level…
5. Locate the Automatic prompting for file downloads sub-category immediately under the Downloads category. Set the radial button to Enable.
6. Locate the File download sub-category immediately under the Downloads category and set the radial button to Enable.
7. Click OK to save the changes and Yes when prompted to confirm the changes.
8. Exit completely out of all IE windows and then try it again

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Just when you think that perhaps Microsoft has learned a thing or two about interface design (after all they just released Vista, which is suppose to be their greatest interface achievement of all time), you install Internet Explorer 7 and are greeted with the cruel joke that is the IE7 Toolbars. Why did they put the menu bar in the middle? This is contrary to every other application on Windows. Supposedly it is due to Vista’s interface.

There is a registry key that you can add to force the menu bar to load on top, like it is in IE6. You will need to add the following key:

After you add the key, close IE7 and open it up and it should now look similar to this:

Reference Microsoft Developer Tony Schreiner’s Weblog.

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When it comes to Internet Explorer, there is one feature that is not particularly useful for web developers. Both IE 6 and the newer version 7, have a feature that overrides error messages sent from the web server to the browser. This feature takes effect any time an error message is less than 512 bytes long. To turn off this feature, you need to bring up Internet Options and go to the Advanced tab, under the Browsing section you will find: Show Friendly HTTP Error Messages. You need to clear this setting and now IE will display all error messages sent from the server.

Note that most web servers send 404 error messages that are less that 512 bytes, by default.

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