January 25, 2005
Speed up Firefox

A fraternity brother sent me this tip. It may be old news, but for me, it worked great to speed up the already fast Firefox browser if you have broadband.

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 recieves.

Sites that loaded slowly in the past pop up quickly now.

Posted by michael at January 25, 2005 08:31 PM | TrackBack

Comments

Lead Mozilla QA wrangler Asa Dotzler wrote about these tweaks on his blog. Granted, enabling HTTP pipelining can help, but setting the initial paint delay to zero "may get you some content on the screen faster, but it's worth noting that it will dramatically slow down the time it takes the entire page to display." :-/

Posted by: Alex [http://www.handcoding.com/] on January 25, 2005 09:11 PM

Ok Alex so 0 is bad for initial paint delay, but what is a good number?

Posted by: Little_Kenny [] on January 25, 2005 10:01 PM

zero seems to work great on my end.

Posted by: martin [http://chokersandwich.com] on January 26, 2005 10:31 AM

Kenny: I'd leave the initial paint delay at the default value -- I think the Mozilla developers knew what they're doing in this case :).

Posted by: Alex [http://www.handcoding.com/] on January 26, 2005 10:42 PM

Here's another for you:
Open Firefox ..type about:config in the address bar and press enter.

Type network.dns in the filter box at the top of the page, two results should remain.

Double click on network.dns.disableIPv6 to change its value to "True"

Restart Firefox. You should notice a speed increase, page to page.

Enjoy!

Posted by: bhell13 [http://www.bhell13.com] on January 27, 2005 05:17 AM

Alex: Ok, I go back to default on that one and see if I notice a difference when I get home tonight. :)

bhell13: I'll give that a go when I get home tonight.

Posted by: Little_Kenny [] on January 27, 2005 01:42 PM
No more comments accepted on this post.