speeding up firefox
 

I came across these instructions on linuxfoo.org and gave them a try. They make a difference.

Making Mozilla's Firefox "FASTER"
Here's something for broadband people that will really speed Firefox up:

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:
Right click on the entries to edit.

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.

If you're using a broadband connection you'll load pages 2-3 times faster now.

Thanks to comtux for the original post.

If this works, why isn't this standard in Firefox?

I think the catch might be in the "for broadband users" bit.
A whole lot of the world is still on dial up.

Re: speeding up firefox
 

I saw this and there's one thing that concerns me. That's the above change. I know there is software that will block IP addresses if they recieve to many requests at once. It's to help guard against DoS (Denial of Service) Attacks. I set mine at 20 and then tried 30 and saw no difference on a 1.5mb download/864kb upload connection.

EDIT: this does work, especially when going from the loading screen after you place a post back to the thread.

Well, I'm on broadband, so these changes are going to be done asap.

well see. On 3000/384, My speed upgrade comes in less than a month to 5 Mbits.

Re: Re: speeding up firefox
 

Thought of something interesting about this...

What if you were able to enter in proxy servers for each different string? That way it would not show your IP address when trying to bombard the servers like that. Now I realize this is probably counter-productive because going through the proxy would slow you down anyways... What do you guys thinK?

Warning

Keep that in mind if you mess with those settings. ;)

so if they dont work for you go back to the defaults

Glad I bookmarked the site I saw it on so I can reset the settings if need be.

yes they do work, i might have to go back and adjust the max connection down from were i was told to set it to (100 btw) to something around 30 or less, but yes i did see that when i made some of the changes one of the smaller forums i post to no longer works at all in FF. this very well could be due to several of the changes as that link indicates.

I tried it on Windows and it made FireFox unstable. It wouldn't crash but 40%-50% of the pages I went to wouldn't render correctly.

EDIT: My Vector Lappy doesn't currently have internet access so I can't test it on there.

I tried it on Wndoze and pages certainly seem to load far faster (when I'm not accessing dynamic pages like this one where the browser will always have to wait for the server to construct it).