How to make firefox faster....

smemon

ok guys, usually when you tamper with these things you pay for it somewhere along the line but i did this over a week ago and everythings still running smoothly.

thanks to http://notebookforums.com/showthread.php?t=54679&page=1&pp=15 , firefox is lightening quick, literally. i dunno about dial-up, but you certainly notice it on broadband. here's how to speed up firefox:

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.

enjoy!!

Hobbes

Might cause probs if you are on 56k modem, or if websites have band-width limiters on them (like the underdogs).

neokenzo

Nice one. Did notice some speed change but I guess I need to test it more

Wertz

Here's a few more to throw into the list.

browser.turbo.enable - true

network.http.max-connections - 30

network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-server - 8

network.http.pipelining - true

network.http.pipelining.maxrequests - 8

It's not kind to servers but then they're not my servers...

Hobbes

Bare in mind some servers will actively ban you if they get nasty sucking. As mentioned Underdogs, think Slashdot will do it too.

tuxy

Hobbes wrote:

Bare in mind some servers will actively ban you if they get nasty sucking. As mentioned Underdogs, think Slashdot will do it too.

ban by ip?
if they do that they will end up banning other people on your isp when you reconnect and get a new ip

Wertz

Hobbes wrote:

Bare in mind some servers will actively ban you if they get nasty sucking. As mentioned Underdogs, think Slashdot will do it too.

Yeah I could see why.
Jsut as a comparison I did the same dsl speedtest with IE and the configured FF. IE got only 210kbps while FF scored 273.
Lot of contention on my line today but I ran those tests straight after each other.

Syth

I had heard about this, but had only done it on my firefox in college. Direct connection to the irish internet backbone means I didn't see any noticeable change. I did it on my PC at home just now and dan, it's fast! I wuv you foxy.

Tusky

smemon wrote:

ok guys, usually when you tamper with these things you pay for it somewhere along the line but i did this over a week ago and everythings still running smoothly.

thanks to http://notebookforums.com/showthread.php?t=54679&page=1&pp=15 , firefox is lightening quick, literally. i dunno about dial-up, but you certainly notice it on broadband. here's how to speed up firefox:

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.

enjoy!!

omfg its twice as fast for me !!! Cheers!

Tony H

Hey Smemon, just tried your tweak on firefox , and i have to say i loved firefox before , but you have just turbo charged it for me, instant loading , firefox rocks, THANK YOU Soooooo much
Tony H

ViperVenoM

sweeeeet! even faster still :eek:

Syth

Sorry, had to post again. This just freaking rocks. Everyone using Firefox should do this. It should be the default settings.

Raphael

Anyone know if this is gonna cause problems with HOTU, and if they're fixeable?

Zounds

i just did this and my connection speed has gone from 270kbps to 370kbps, according to bandwiidth tester extension at least, it rocks. Though does anyone have any ideas what sites besides Underdogs this'll cause problems with?

Mimikyu

This post has been deleted.

Zounds

......yes, yes it is

pwd

What sort of connection are you getting 10MBps with? That is about 40 times the speed of typical broadband rates.

po0k

LAN connection to a ATM, Ethernet or Frame-Relay pipe in work/college.

I'd be wary against setting the "Max Connections to one server"-related tweaks to anything above 8 or so.

Web servers can only take X amount of concurrent connections, people doing mutli-connections soak up the available "space".
That Esat Young Scientist Award winner with his "super browser" is a perfect example.
If everyone did this the net would grind to a halt very, very fast.

With Tabbed browsing there's isn't a whole lot of solid arguments for multi-threaded connections to a single website, load it up in the background, switch to another tab and browse/read/whatever there until the previous one is loaded.

Still, some of the tweaks are very valid

You should look at the browser.cache.* values too.

Plenty of scope for tweaks here and there.

Mimikyu

This post has been deleted.

Zounds

NTL should be 1mbps, i've noticed an odd trend of people's PC telling them their connection is far faster than it really is. For example yesterday a friends PC reported a connection of 400mbps

Mimikyu

This post has been deleted.

ai ing

You can also do these tweaks through a nice gui interface. The extension is Tweak Network Settings

Also network pipelining was included in the HTTP 1.1 standards. Servers do not have to implement it but they cannot refuse your connection if you use it.

po0k

Solitaryman666 wrote:

This post has been deleted.

"Local Area Connection 2" refers to your network card.
You're card is running a 10Mbit link between your PC and the NTL cable modem.
Your cable modem is connected to NTL's network at 1Mbps.

longword

smemon wrote:

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

30 is a stupidly high number. 4 will get you as much benefit as you're going to see from the tweak. Anything above 8 will be positively counter-productive. As a server admin, I can tell you if I noticed people habitually making 30 simultaneous connections, I'd take great delight in dropping 70% of the packets to and from that IP address for 24 hours. It's easy enough to implement.

longword

Did a bit of reasearch on this one. The tweaks don't do what you think they do. The original HTTP/1.0 protocol was easy. One connection meant one URL request. The content was transferred and the connection was closed. HTTP/1.1 allowed the connection to hang around for a bit so the browser could request a second and further URLs from the same HTTP connection. That's pipelining.

network.http.pipelining.maxrequests sets the number of URLs that the browser will request through one connection before closing that connection and opening a new one. These requests are made sequentially, not in parallel. But you do win big by not having to create a new HTTP connection every time. Big numbers like 30 should be safe enough and won't cause excessive load on the web server.

Zascar

If your on a 56k, what should you change/leave alone?

longword

Zascar wrote:

If your on a 56k, what should you change/leave alone?

Turning on pipelining should always be a win, even more so for a high latency connection like a dialup modem. The only down side is a handful of servers running totally archaic software might not work correctly. That probably won't bother anyone.

BloodBath

If anything the changes seem to have made it slower, it's probably just placebo effect on everyone though.


BloodBath

Töpher

Works for me. Usually slow sites, such as meteor.ie are belting along, my little brother even looked over my shoulder and asked why it was going so much faster! Mwahahaha! Thats on NTL 1500k and after clearing my cache

ai ing

Here is another great tip.
Firefox is slow to load initially on Windows XP. You can speed this up a bit by using XP's built in prefetcher. Simply right-click on the Firefox icon you use to start the browser. Select Properties and in the "Target" line, add the text: /Prefetch:1

The whole line should resemble this:
"C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe" /Prefetch:1

A explanation of how this works is available here http://techrepublic.com.com/5100-6270_11-5165773.html?tag=e064

Made a big difference on my own system.