Review: Splash

Firefox, especially if you have lots of extensions, does take sometime to start up. There are times I wonder is it loading? So I click the icon again thinking may be it didn’t work the first time around. Then I end up with Fx opened up in two windows. This is not a big deal, I just closed the extra browser window.

Then I discovered a simple and customizable solution, the Splash extension. When you start Firefox a “Splash” (loading) screen will appear when Firefox is starting up. The default image is taken from the graphic that is displayed on your About Firefox screen. However, you can customize and make your own “Splash” Screen as seen below:

Default Fx Splash Screen

My Custom Fx Splash Screen
(image courtesy of Mr Tech’s Firefox Splash Screens)

The extension is really simple to setup via its Options menu:
Tools >> Add-ons (or Extensions), Splash and then click Options.
Note: If you are having trouble with Splash’s Options window “rolling-up” this can be fixed via about:config by changing browser.preferences.animateFadeIn to False.

The options screen allows the following customizations:

• Choose the image to be displayed
• Add background text
• Choose the size of the splash screen
• Specify how long the screen will be displayed
• Play a sound file on start-up
• plus more

Splash is about 24K and works with Firefox 1.5 – 3.0a2 and does create the illusion Firefox is loading quicker!

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