Mike's Tech Blog

Firefox is Mozilla's offering to browsers on computers. It seems more secure than Microsoft's Internet Explorer, as well as having fewer bugs. However on its initial install Firefox seems a bit slow. Here are a few tweaks that you can do to speed up Firefox. These tweaks will work for Windows, MAC-OSX, or linux versions of Firefox.

 

To speed up Firefox, you need to change some of its settings. To do this, just type the following where you normally enter a web address: about:config and firefox will give you a warning (starting out with "Here be dragons! - I love it when developers are allowed to inject a sense of humor!) stating that changing settings can be harmful. Yes it can, and standard disclaimers apply. (I can't be held responsible, bla bla..). Just click the "I'll be careful" button (You will - right?) and you will see something similar to the following:

In the filter bar type the following: network.http.pipelining and you will see the following:

 We are going to change the first item, network.http.pipelining by double clicking it, and it will change to true. 

The next item we are going to change is right below the last one we changed, and that is network.http.pipelining maxrequests.  Do this by right clicking on it once, then selecting modify which will bring up a dialog box that will let you change it. We want to make it 30 then click OK.

So now having changed these two parameters, you should have the hang of changing them. Basically if its of type boolean, then just double click. Otherwise do the right click thing.

Here is a list of variables that need changed, as well as their desired value:

network.dns.disableIPv6             true
plugin.expose_full_path             true

In order to find them, just start typing them in the filter bar, and they will appear.

The next series of Firefox tweaks require us to create our own prefernce names. In order to do this you just right click anywhere inside the firefox window, but not on a preference name. Just in the white area somewhere.Then click New then either String, Integer or Boolean depending on the data type. Your screen should look somthing like this:

 Here is a list of preference names that need to be added along with their data types, and values:

nglayout.initialpaint.delay             integer              0
content.notify.backoffcount        integer              5
ui.submenuDelay                             integer              0
browser.cache.memory.capacity    integer            16384

Close down Firefox, and restart it.Now firefox will load web pages 3 - 30 times faster!

  -- Mike