Super Charge your Firefox!

gre_soul

Yes, firefox is already pretty damn fast but did you know that you can tweak it and improve the speed even more?

That's the beauty of this program being open source.
Here's what you do:
In the URL bar, type “about:config” and press enter. This will bring up the configuration “menu” where you can change the parameters of Firefox.

Note that these are what I’ve found to REALLY speed up my Firefox significantly - and these settings seem to be common among everybody else as well. But these settings are optimized for broadband connections - you’d better have a big connection.

Double Click on the following settins and put in the numbers below - for the true / false booleans - they’ll change when you double click.

browser.tabs.showSingleWindowModePrefs – true
network.http.max-connections – 48
network.http.max-connections-per-server – 16
network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-proxy – 8
network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-server – 4
network.http.pipelining – true
network.http.pipelining.maxrequests – 100
network.http.proxy.pipelining – true
network.http.request.timeout – 300

One more thing… Right-click somewhere on that screen and add a 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. Since you’re broadband - it shouldn’t have to wait.

Now you should notice you’re loading pages MUCH faster now! post your results here.

aidan_walsh

There was a thread about this a short while ago...

gre_soul

must have missed it anyway not to worry eh!

damien

From the blog of a Firefox Developer:
http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/asa/archives/007164.html

After seeing at least a couple dozen blog posts all referencing these changes to "speed up Firefox", I thought it would be worth a little explanation.

Yes, enabling HTTP pipelining can dramatically improve networking performance. The downside, and the reason it's not enabled by default, is that it can prevent Web pages from displaying correctly. If you've enabled this, and you find pages that aren't displaying correctly, please don't blame Firefox or the Web developer. It's probably the fact that you enabled an "unsupported" feature which is incompatible with some Web servers and proxy servers.

The second change, setting the initial paint delay at 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. Here's what's going on. Gecko, Firefox's rendering engine, is trying to optimize between the cost of waiting for a bit more data versus doing more painting and reflows as new data comes in. Waiting a bit longer before it starts painting the page gives Gecko a chance to receive more content before chewing up CPU cycles to render and reflow the document. If you drop this value down to zero or near zero, that means you'll see the page start displaying a bit earlier, but not having received much data in that short interval, you'll have a lot more paint and reflow cycles to complete rendering of the page.

This one probably comes down to a combination of bandwidth, CPU speed, and personal preference. If it works for you, and you don't mind the side-effects, then great. Just note that what works for one person/system, may not work for another.

Just so you know

gre_soul

well its working great for me atm ... dont come calling at my door if it all goes pear shaped

Mimikyu

This post has been deleted.

DoesNotCompute

Tis a great boost, although:

network.http.pipelining.maxrequests – 100

I find setting this variable to 100 actually slows down the loading of pages. 40 seems to be an ideal value for me.

smemon

yeah i started the other thread, doesnt effect me. you can always reset them anyway if you encounter problems.