Tweaks To Speed Up The Portable Firefox Browser

Portable Firefox web browser is intended for use on portable media such as a USB flash drive but it can also be used on any hard disk drive. The browsercan run quite slow, but there are hacks/tweaks to make it run faster.


First we need to eliminate the amount of RAM Firefox uses for it’s cache feature
Here’s how to fix it:
1. type “about:config” (no quotes) in the browser address bar
2. Find browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewer
3. set it’s value to “0″

Increase the Speed in Which Firefox loads pages
1. stay in about:config
2. Alter the entries as follows:
Set “network.http.pipelining” to “true”
Set “network.http.proxy.pipelining” to “true”
Set “network.http.pipelining.maxrequests” to some number like 30 (this might piss off some website owners as it will request the page 30 times)
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 receives.

Reduce RAM usage to 10mb when Firefox is minimized
This little about:config hack will drop the RAM usage down to 10 Mb when Firefox is minimized
1. Open Firefox and go to the Address Bar. Type in about:config and then press Enter.
2. Right Click in the page and select New -> Boolean.
3. In the box that pops up enter config.trim_on_minimize. Press Enter.
4. Now select True and then press Enter.
5. Restart Firefox

 

About Rob Rogers

Once a prolific author here on Tech-Recipes, Rob has moved on to greener pastures.
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2 Responses to “Tweaks To Speed Up The Portable Firefox Browser”

  1. July 21, 2011 at 4:40 pm, Deep Thought said:

    Don’t use trim_on_minimize when running it from a portable drive. It writes everything to disk every time you minimize Firefox, which in this case would be a flash drive. Bad idea.

    Reply

  2. May 09, 2012 at 6:17 pm, Derek said:

    Made all the changes and it’s noticeably faster. Thanks

    Reply

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