Increase Firefox Speed?

Question

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...)

Answer 1

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.

Answer 2

Most if not all of these options will be tradeoffs.

A good reference is http://kb.mozillazine.org/Category:Preferences

Answer 3

The downside to pipelining is that is puts additional strain on the webserver you're requesting pages from. Just one person doing this isn't a big problem, but lots of people use this tweak. This is definitely a large contributor to the "Slashdot effect" where a smaller site will crash upon being linked to by a very popular site (like Slashdot, Digg, Reddit, etc etc). A ton of people are directed to that site, and if even 25% of them are pipelining than the server strain starts to increase almost exponentially.

Also, the numbers in those instructions are too high. Firefox caps the number of simultaneous HTTP requests anyway. I recall reading that the maximum was something like 8 or 16, but I could be wrong.

Answer 4

It's probably overkill, but a friend of mine copies his ~/.mozilla to a tmpfs, runs Firefox on that directory, and copies it back every couple minutes in case the kernel panics.

Answer 5

I personally have been using the FireFox extension FasterFox and it has made a marked improvement in my browser experience. I'm not 100% sure what all it changes, but it is a very easy process since it is a simple add-on.