Firefox Speed Tip

Novell Cool Solutions: Tip
By Scott M. Morris

Digg This - Slashdot This Posted: 6 Jan 2005

Firefox is by far the best web browser available. Not prone to the gaping security holes of Microsoft Internet Explorer, there are volumes that could be written about how superb it really is.

I'd like to pass on a quick tip that would help speed it up just a bit. If you are a broadband user, this is something you won't want to pass up, especially with how simple it is to do.

First, open Firefox. In the address bar, type "about:config" and press "Enter."

In the page that comes up, scroll down and edit the following entries:

Locate "network.http.pipelining" and set it to "true."

Locate "network.http.proxy.pipelining" and set it to "true."

Locate "network.http.pipelining.maxrequests" and set it to "30."

Finally, right-click anywhere on the page. Select "New" and then "Integer." In the box that comes up, type "nglayout.initialpaint.delay" and click "OK." Then give it the value of "0" (zero) and click "OK." This simply denotes how long Firefox waits before acting on received information.

If you are on broadband, your browsing experience should be quite a bit faster, now!

Reader Comments

• According to http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=53650 there is an internal limit of 8 for network.http.pipelining.maxrequests, and any higher value will be ignored.
• What is pipelining? Suggestions w/out explanations are lame.
• Using this tip can severly impact any/all websites you visit. It works as a sort of Denial of Service (DOS), pounding the server by requested far more than you fair share of http requests at one time. Please, be kind to your web admins...don't use this.
• Considerably speeds up table-based layouts with loads of graphics. As a side note: this is not a DOS as mentinoned in another comment.
• Very Good 很方便了瞭解
• Ok, it takes a LOT to impress me... But this did! I use a lot of Webmin sessions for our internal machines and they are usually really slow to load and update in Firefox, this tweak has made a MASSIVE improvement. The only one cautious comment I have is about the maxrequests line. We have had a big debate here and an inhouse techie reminded me that we nearly lost our webserver once as a user had changed his concurrent TCP connections to 100 on all his machines in his office, this meant that when he was looking at our customer portal rather than sending a maximum of 4 concurrent requests (and the rest waiting in line) his machine was trying to send about 40 (then there was the other 20 odd machines in his office trying to do the same! so we had 800 attempted connections at one point, the server in question is set to 400 so half the guys got a server busy message). I have still used this tweak just lowered it to 10.

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