Making Firefox Faster

Here’s a way to speed up Firefox browsers.

Straight out of the box, the browser will request only one item at a time.  This means that when a page is made up of lots of pictures and other files, it’s going to take longer to load because each part has to be fetched one thing at a time.  This is an easy tweak that you can do which will allow Firefox to load a lot of things at once, making web pages load a LOT faster.

(note: don’t type the quotes in the items below)

Type “about:config” into the address bar and hit return.  This brings up a page of FF’s internal settings

Scroll down the list and find “network.http.pipelining“, and if it’s set to “false”, double click it to change the setting to “true”.  Do the same with “network.http.proxy.pipelining“.  These settings enable making more than one request at a time.

Next find “network.http.pipelining.maxrequests” and double click on it.  A popup box will appear.  Set it to 50.  This setting will make firefox make 50 requests at a time.

Now right-click anywhere and select New, then select Integer.  Name it “nglayout.initialpaint.delay” and set it to “0”.  This is how long Firefox will wait before it acts on information it recieves.

The next step is to set

“network.http.max-connections” to 200, “network.http.max-connections-per-server” to 100, “network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-proxy” 50, and “network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-server” 10

After this, you can close that tab and I recommend shutting down the browser and re-starting it to make certain that the settings are saved.

I’ve seen a noticeable increase in page loading speed since I put these settings into effect.  It only takes a few minutes to do and definitely helps.

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