Speeding up Firefox

When I used to do I.T. for WSUI, I pushed for people to use Firefox as their default browser on their PC. Fellow tech support monkeys can understand that for obvious reasons.

I just recalled this tip that I caught wind of about a year or so ago. This is a really great way to speed up Firefox, and it doesn’t require you to download anything to do it. This mostly applies to those folks on broadband, so if you’re on dial-up, this isn’t for you.

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
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. Lastly, right-click anywhere and select “New” -> “Integer“.
5. 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.
6. Restart Firefox.  You can follow steps 1 through 5 to be sure that your changes saved correctly.
• Note: You might have to make these settings changes everytime Firefox is updated.

This works for the Mac version, too. Logging into WordPress is a snap, and browsing just got a whole lot faster. Once again, another reason I’m a happy switcher to Firefox.