How to Speed Up Firefox

Contributed by Chillyb

October 5, 2005

Tagged: Mozilla Firefox

Still using Internet Explorer to surf the web? Do yourself a favor and check out Mozilla’s Firefox. After it’s installed, follow the steps listed below to optimize it. For those who already use it, you’ll see the difference straight away.
Enjoy!

Type “about:config” in your firefox address bar.
Search for the following settings:
1. network.http.pipelining
Set to true
2. network.http.pipelining.firstrequest
Set to true
3. network.http.pipelining.maxrequests
Set to 32
4. network.http.proxy.pipelining
Set to true
5. nglayout.initialpaint.delay
Set to 0

Its very likely that you won’t have an entry for network.http.pipelining.firstrequest. Thats ok. Just add one.

Right-click on the preferences list, select ‘New’ then select ‘Boolean’

On the first prompt, type:

network.http.pipelining.firstrequest

On the second prompt, set it to ‘true’

Its also likely that you won’t have an entry for nglayout.initialpaint.delay

Right-click on the preferences list, select ‘New’ then select ‘Integer
On the first prompt, type:
nglayout.initialpaint.delay
On the second prompt, set it to ‘0′

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Viewing 9 Comments

Anonymous 3 years ago 1 point
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Many thx!
Very noticeable improvement, especially as i am running Firefox on a very old machine: P 133!!!

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risherz 3 years ago 1 point
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Well if you wan't to speed up firefox without tweaking all the settings yourself I would use Mozilla Optimizer, which is going to tweak your pipelining settings and make Firefox faster (the same thing the recipe tells you)! You can download this at
http://www.softpedia.com/get/Tweak/Browser-Tweak/Mozilla-Optimizer.shtml and all you do is run it and it does this for you.
You can also get FasterFox (a firefox extension) which also tweaks your about:config settings.
You can get this at https://addons.mozilla.org/extensions/moreinfo.php?id=1269&application=firefox

Try either one of them and you are definately going to see a speed difference just like the recipe says!

Hope this helps the people who don't want to change settings themselves! :D

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johnw 2 years ago 1 point
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maxrequests is set to 4 for a very good reason. Setting it to 32 is fairly hostile/inconsiderate to a web server administrator.

Other than that, good tips.

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Anonymous 2 years ago 1 point
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if i accidentally hit New String. how do I change it to Boolean? or does it not matter thanks.

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risherz 2 years ago 1 point
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<ul id="quote"><h6>TONY_N wrote:</h6>if i accidentally hit New String. how do I change it to Boolean? or does it not matter thanks.</ul>

In order to remove any preference from the about:config area (in this case the string) just right click (or control click) on it and hit 'Reset' and just restart Firefox. It is going to remove the string. Then just add in the correct boolean.

It doesn't really matter anyways, but if it is causing problems then you might want to remove the string.

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Anonymous 2 years ago 1 point
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thanks a lot!

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Anonymous 2 years ago 1 point
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nglayout.initialpaint.delay

da second promt is either true or falst, not a number. so now what? keep it as false?

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Anonymous 1 year ago 1 point
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Is this working for FF2?

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Anonymous 1 year ago 1 point
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forget "tweaking" firefox. use local DNS

TreeWalker "Hawk"

<img src="http://img504.imageshack.us/img504/2474/beahawkoy5.png"></img>

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