For information on the technology used to create the portal or for any problems you may encounter please contact Julie Verleyen, Technical Project Manager of The European Library.

Supported Browsers and Operating Systems

Safari and Opera are not currently supported as they do not support XSLT. The choice of client side architecture rather than server side may make supporting these browsers unlikely.

The European Library Portal is a federated search service; many different search requests are sent to the National libraries of Europe via "http://". The default network settings of a browser are not designed for this type of request and these settings are in fact one of the main bottlenecks in The European Library portal search performances.

"The European Library - FireFox" speedup plug-in optimises FireFox network settings for federated searching. The installation of the plug-in is likely to increase the speed of overall retrieval time by 60%.

Follow the below 7 steps:

1. Download the plug-in
2. Click on "Edit Options" on top.
3. Click on "Allow"
4. Close
5. Click on Download the plug-in again.
6. Click on "Install now"
7. Click on "Restart FireFox"

Note that "The European Library - FireFox" speed generator plug-in is designed for FireFox 1.5 and higher.