Reducing Network Traffic
Two of the biggest offenders that create unnecessary and unwanted traffic (thus decreasing performance) in a server based computing environment are Macromedia Flash and animated GIF's. There are two things you can do to Mozilla and Firefox to mitigate this noise.
For the Flash issue, I highly recommend using the FlashBlock extension. Instead of displaying the Flash animation, it displays a little button that the user can click on should they choose to view it. The only complaint I have about it is that the little button dances causing traffic.
For the animated GIF issue, there is a preference that you can change that controls how many times the animation will repeat. If the user has not ran Moz/Fx yet, put the following setting in the system wide all.js file for you languauge and all users will get this preference
pref("image.animation_mode", "once")
If the users have already setup their browsers, you can add the following line to the users $HOME/.mozilla/*.slt/prefs.js. However, you must ensure that the browser is closed.
user_pref("image.animation_mode", "once")
If you want to have the users do it manually, they can just type about:config in the URL bar, Scroll down to image.animation_mode, double click, change normal to once, hit OK. They must then close and reopen the browser to have the change take effect.
Finally, if you have an out of control web designer that does that does not understand that less is more, my only recommendation is to grab the nearest Sun Ray 1g and beat them about the head with it.
