How to: Speed up Mozilla Firefox

[Ljiljan]

After you get past the beginner stage with Firefox, try this "power-user" trick to make it download pages faster by allowing multiple connections so it can download more than one file at a time. It's only useful for broadband users, so if you're still on dial-up you can just skip this one for now.

Here's something for broadband people that will really speed Firefox up:

1.Type "about:config" into the address bar and hit return. Scroll down and look for the following entries:

network.http.pipelining
network.http.proxy.pipelining
network.http.pipelining.maxrequests

Normally the browser will make one request to a web page at a time. When you enable pipelining it will make several at once, which really speeds up page loading.

2. Alter the entries as follows:

Set "network.http.pipelining" to "true"

Set "network.http.proxy.pipelining" to "true"

Set "network.http.pipelining.maxrequests" to some number like 30. This means it will make 30 requests at once.

3. Lastly right-click anywhere and select New-> Integer. Name it "nglayout.initialpaint.delay" and set its value to "0". This value is the amount of time the browser waits before it acts on information it receives.

If you're using a broadband connection you'll load pages MUCH faster now!

That's work with my cable connection and my Firefox! You will have really speed boost in Firefox performance! - Enjoy

[s-Lec]

what? this is confusing, guess the firefox now is good enough

[weblord]

not so ive done this before, good for my dsl which is now very slow for me, without upgrading yet i can benefit from this.

[Ljiljan]

well... it works really good with cable connection and Firefox rules without that trick anyway

[Toxic]

There were a whole bunch of O' Reilly hacks to better the performance of Firefox. I'll post the link if I come across it again. Those particular tweaks happen to be the most famous.

You could alternatively use Fasterfox. I haven't noticed too much of a difference while using it but others have claimed a huge jump in performance.

[Ljiljan]

I think that's this link: O'Reily Firefox Hacks!

[windrider]

You should not use FasterFox! It puts unnecessary loads on servers by pre-fetching links!

And the Firefox tweaks mentioned in the first post are simple to make, if you only spend a few minutes reading the full post.

[Ljiljan]

well... i think that Firefox is easyest and best supported web browser on net ... But not fastest!
Opera is really fast but not good for Firefox

[Toxic]

FasterFox allows you to disable prefetching. People do have concerns with prefetching especially if they're on a network where internet usage is monitored.

Its other bunch of tweaks are an alternative instead of using about:config.

[Ljiljan]

... yup but that about:config tweak is better than FasterFox extension, at least on my connection