Wednesday, April 2, 2008

Make Firefox Faster

I came across a few cool tricks that will make Firefox run faster. The tricks are actually quite old as they have been around the Internet for quite some time, but it still works great for me, so I think it's worth sharing here.

(If you are still using IE, I recommend you to download Firefox now. It's a free web browser, with enhanced security and a bunch of cool stuff.)

Here are the cool tricks to make Firefox faster in loading pages:

1. On the URL bar, enter "about:config".

2. In the filter, enter "network.http.pipelining" to bring up this preference name. By default, the value is set to "false". Double click on it to change the value to "true".

3. Enter "network.http.proxy.pipelining" in the filter to bring up this preference name, and double click on it to turn the value to "true".

4. Enter "network.http.pipelining.maxrequests" in the filter to bring up this preference name. The default value is 4. Double click and set the value to 10.

By doing the few tweaks above, your Firefox web browser will become much faster in loading pages.

What does the tweak do?
When we are browsing the Internet, our web browser (Firefox) is the client, and will be requesting data from the servers (e.g. YouTube, FaceBook, Blogger etc..) to be displayed on the browser. By default, most of the web browser (including Firefox) will be sending one request at a time to the server, and wait for the respond from the server before sending the next request. By doing the setting above, we are actually enabling what we call the HTTP pipelining which enable Firefox to send multiple request simultaneuously without having to wait for the respond from server. And the number of requests that we can send in one time is controlled by the value that we entered for "network.http.pipelining.maxrequests" (step 4), which we have set it to 10. By doing this, Firefox will now be sending 10 request at a time, which will make it load much faster.

Any side effect for making this tweak?
Yes, some servers that do not support pipelining are not able to handle multiple request will cause page to load incorrectly. That is the reason Firefox has it turned off by default. But I haven't got any problem so far after making this tweak, and my Firefox did perform much faster. I assume most web server nowadays do support pipelining.

Are there more tweaks to make Firefox even faster?
There are actually a few more preferences that can be tweak, but some of them will harm the performance if set incorrectly. There's no best setting for everyone as the tweak will base on the combination of bandwidth, CPU speed, and personal preference. Visit the mozillaZine knowledgebase for more Firefox tweaking preference. I would recommend to make only the pipelining tweak, and stick to the default setting for other preferences. Enabling the pipelining alone will make Firefox much faster!

39 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thanks for sharing with us.

Anonymous said...

I tried tweaking firefox for performance once and actually severely slowed it down instead. Not sure if I am ready to try again.

Anonymous said...

This is a great find, I need to tweak my browser its so sluggish, very useful, thanks.

Anonymous said...

Thanks for the great will definately put it to good use. I much prefer the use of Firefox as I believe there are way too many bugs in the IE Browser. So thanks for the update

Johnbtes said...

That's awesome! Use that quickness to head over to http://www.modern-contemporaryfurniture.com

Anonymous said...

ever since i found firefox is better, ive never use IE anymore. and thanks for sharing this with us tOO.

cheers!!

Anonymous said...

Can't you just use the extension called FasterFox? That'll make life easier :D

Anonymous said...

I was all about this tweak. I read Michael comment about Fasterfox and I agree that is the way to go for the lazy guys out there like me.

Anonymous said...

Ah the old pipelining trick! Yeah this works great.

Anonymous said...

Thanks for the information, will try the tweaking.x

Anonymous said...

That's a great tip. I tried it out straight away and it's worked out fine so far.

Anonymous said...

I just did the tweaks you suggested and they've sped things up quite a bit. Thanks for the tips!

Anonymous said...

Ha.. wow that actually works really well.. thanks!

Anonymous said...

nice tips - not seen these before

Anonymous said...

Thanks for sharing !!

Anonymous said...

thanks for information

Anonymous said...

I had to give up on Firefox, the speed and memory-leaking was so bad on my little iBook. I thought I would miss the extensions when I switched to Safari but I actually got used to it very quickly. Maybe when FF3 comes out I'll give it another try.

Anonymous said...

Wow, thanks for the tip, i always felt there was i slight lag with firefox in loading pages compared to IE. This should speed things up!

Nice website!

Anonymous said...

Thanks for the Firefox tech tip! :D

The High Council of NERD-dom will be proud ;)

http://bookierant.com

Anonymous said...

Hey I tried this trick already and its working very well for me.Hope we get some think like this for internet explorer also.

Anonymous said...

Those are some nice tips for speeding up your FireFox browser. I already started using some of them.

Anonymous said...

I tried this, but it seems to have disabled a few of my other plugins for Firefox (name Tab Sidebar, which is pretty nifty) I'm going to see if I can get it to work together (I can always use a faster Firefox!) Thanks for sharing the tip.

Anonymous said...

Thanks for the info...now a days I will start up 3-4 tabs at the same time, and it was killing me. This will really help. Always looking to find a way to make things faster!

Anonymous said...

As awesome as these mini-hacks are, to get some real speed you should probably just download Firefox 3 Beta 5. It is almost 100% stable and is LIGHTNING fast. I don't think it is even possible to trick out your FF2 to be as fast as FF3B5. The link to the beta is: http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/all-beta.html

Enjoy!

Unknown said...

Its really good tricks to make our Firefox browser fast, i tried, its working... GREAT!!

Unknown said...

Its really good tricks to make our Firefox browser faster, i tried, its working..........GREAT!!

Anonymous said...

I'm one of the firefox user, and some of the tips you provided i already use, and this show better result.

Anonymous said...

Thats wonderful information you have shared.I have tried what you have given here , believe be my firefox brower has become faster than before.

Anonymous said...

Interesting tips -- I prefer firefox over internet explorer any day.

Anonymous said...

I have more problems loading my free classified ads page on IE 7.0 than Firefox. I think that over the next few years firefox will eventually overtake IE!

Anonymous said...

Firefox does have its faults, and its slowness in loading pages is just one. But I think what almost everyone isn't aware of is that with more and more people switching from IE to Firefox, they're leaving themselves vulnerable to hacking attacks because they (the hackers) have realized this switch would happen sooner than later and are already a step ahead of the game.

Anonymous said...

thats for this, added the tweaks seems better =)

Anonymous said...

Just, tried it out now and you can actually notice the difference! I've got so much junk on my PC i had to give up IE a while back and move to Firefox. There's no way I'd go back now, even with a new machine!

registry cleaner reviews said...

I don't know how to tell you how greatful I am for this article. I saw almost immediate improvement in mt browser performance

Fix registry problems said...

Brilliant tip, my browser is so quick now. Many thanks!

Tom Walsh.

ParetoLogic Privacy Controls Review said...

Thanks for that great tip! Now my stuff is running much faster.

best registry cleaner said...

Hey thanks for this. It worked really well. I had noticed that Firefox had been getting slower with each release but this really helps a great deal.

Now if there was a way to stop Firefox memory leaks I would love it!

Anonymous said...

Nice post. Firefox is my favorite web browser - it's so fast and reliable that I love it!

Best Registry Cleaners said...

Nice post - Thanks for sharing this with us/

 
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