Make Firefox more powerful for Linux with these three tweaks

Novell Cool Solutions: Tip
By Domnic Mendes

Digg This - Slashdot This Posted: 14 Nov 2005

The Firefox Web browser is quickly becoming one of the most prominent Web browsers available. The fact that it is cross-platform makes it a comfortable browser for users who have to use more than one OS. There are, however, a number of hidden "gems" that you can enable that make Firefox even more powerful than it is "out of the box."

To increase the speed of opening Web pages, there are two options you can tweak. The first is to enable HTTP pipelining, which allows Firefox to request multiple files simultaneously rather than one at a time. To enable this, type about:config in the address bar. Scroll down the list until you find network.http.pipelining and set it to true. You can also enable network.http.proxy.pipelining as well.

To speed up rendering speeds, you can tell Firefox not to wait the default quarter second before drawing Web content. The option to look for here is the nglayout.initialpaint.delay, but it may not be displayed in the preference list by default. If not, right-click on the screen and select New | Integer. Type nglayout.initialpaint.delay as the preference name and the number 0 as the value. By default, Firefox uses a value of 250 (milliseconds).

Finally, the last gem is not a preference modification but an invaluable extension that is extremely useful for anyone doing Web development. In Firefox, click Tools | Extensions and a new box will open. Click on Get More Extensions. In the new page that opens, click on Developer Tools under the All Extensions sidebar. Jump to the last page and install the Web Developer extension. Once the extension is installed, restart Firefox and you'll see a new toolbar with a number of options that include the ability to quickly validate HTML and CSS, view image dimensions, outline tables and table cells, and a lot more.

Reader Comments

• Thank you so much! Works on all platforms with firefox
• Not bad! Thanks for the tips!
• Don't forget to quit Firefox to make your changes permanent. (If you just logout they are gone)
• Good stuff!
• Clear instructions, and an explanation for why we should want to do it. Great!
• Clear instructions. Relevant. And a good explanation for why we should try it. Great!

Novell Cool Solutions (corporate web communities) are produced by WebWise Solutions. www.webwiseone.com