Firefox – Increase Firefox Speed

firefoxhttpspeed

Found a way to really speed up Firefox – I've implemented it and noticed serious speed improvements. Can anyone comment ?

  1. Type in the Firefox address about:config
  2. Accept the Warning notification and continue
  3. At the top of the page will be a filter – search for, and adjust, the following settings:

network.http.pipelining: true
network.http.proxy.pipelining: true

network.http.max-connections: 50

network.http.max-connections-per-server:
40
network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-proxy:
20
network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-server:
10
network.http.pipelining.maxrequests:
20

  1. Then right-click anywhere in a blank space and select New –> Integer
  2. Name this integer “nglayout.initialpaint.delay” and set its value to 0.
  3. Right-click again anywhere in a blank space and select New –> Boolean
  4. Name this boolean “config.trim_on_minimize” and set its value to True.
  5. Now in the Icon Tray, right-click on the Mozilla Firefox Icon and select Properties
  6. Under “Target”, you will see the line “C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe”
  7. Change this line to “C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe” /Prefetch:1″
  8. Ensure that there is a space i.e. \firefox”(space)/Prefetch:1″

Got this off a website I found via Twitter (removed link; see history if you care…)

Best Answer

Take a look at this article by Asa Dotzler (a Mozilla dev). The downside to this is that not all websites will display correctly, and that while you see some content much faster than you normally would, overall the page takes longer to display.

A long time ago, I also found on another site a note which mentioned that changing the network settings also makes more requests than normal to the web server, and has led to websites banning people who use this hack because of the strain it puts on their servers.

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