Faster Firefox

[SlackAlice]

A lot of us now use Firefox as a web browser, but the default settings are set for dial-up rather than broadband speeds. Found this to speed up Firefox, but do the backup first!

Back up Firefox registry

Make sure Firefox is closed then select Start, Run (in Vista just Start) type '%appdata%\mozilla\firefox\profiles' and press enter.
The resulting Windows Explorer will contain a folder called '4hwOenat.default' Open the folder and copy the file prefs.js to a safe place.
If you mess something up you can just put the file back in to return to the defaults.

Faster Firefox for Broadband

The default settings for Firefox are set for dial up.

1) Next start Firefox and type in the address bar 'about:config' (no quotes) and press Enter

2) Enter 'network.http' in the filter field. Now make the following changes

3) Under Preference Name, double click network.http.pipelining to set it to 'true'

4)Then double click network.http.pipelining.maxrequests to bring up the 'Enter integer value' dialog box. Enter a higher number than the default 4 try 15 which is what I used. Press Enter.

5) Double click network.http.proxy.pipelining to set it to true

6) Right click anywhere on the page and select New, Integer. Enter nglayout.initialpaint.delay and press ok. Set its value to 0 (zero) and press ok again. Close Firefox .

I got this from a computer magazine and tried it myself. Firefox is much quicker now. My settings were altered about 5 weeks ago and no problems yet.
Best way for you to do this is look at this post using IE6/7 and working from there to adjust Firefox.
I've now proof read this about 6 times and cannot see any typos, so try it out and let me know how it goes

[rojash]

It's a lot easier to simply install FasterFox:

http://fasterfox.mozdev.org/

[SlackAlice]

If you check the forums at Mozilla you will find the Faster Firefox plugin does'nt always work as intended. Many users of it didn't get an improvement and quite a few users found it made it worse. It did'nt do anything for me, so I uninstalled that plug in some time ago.

[fo3nix]

Maybe so, but your suggestions just do what fasterfox acheives.

Any appeared speed increase is either random, due to other servers' speed increases, or placebo.

Another suggestion for anyone: change your DNS settings to OpenDNS. You may well find it speeds up your browsing too. This applies for any operating system and any browser.

http://www.opendns.com