Making FireFox Faster

There are ways to make FireFox render pages faster, with just a few easy tweaks. I learnt about this tip through one of our office emails. I tried it and it did make a difference for me.

This is what the email said: To get started, type “about:config” in your FireFox address bar. The settings you’re looking for are:

1. network.http.pipelining
2. network.http.pipelining.firstrequest
3. network.http.pipelining.maxrequests
4. network.http.proxy.pipelining
5. nglayout.initialpaint.delay

Set #1, #2, and #4 to “true”. Set #3 to a high number, like 32. Set #5 to 0.

Enabling the pipelining features allows the browser to make multiple requests to the server at the same time.

The “maxrequests” is the maximum number of requests it will send at once. I’ve heard that 8 is the most it will send at once, but setting it higher won’t hurt, just in case.

The initialpaint.delay is the length of time (in milliseconds) after the server response before the browser begins to paint the page.

I couldn’t find #2. So, I adjusted the settings for #1, #3, #4 and #5 and it did help pages render faster in FireFox.

After installing FasterFox as per Daniel’s suggestion below, I found #2 as well.

Related posts:

1. FireFox Extensions FireFox is the best thing that happened in the browser...

Tags: FireFox

This entry was posted is filed under Browsers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.