Firefox is a great browser so, when I came across an article outlining how to make Firefox even better by speeding it up I had to pass it along!
The steps involved are really straightforward –
- You type “about:config” into the address bar and press return
- You change “network.http.pipelining” to “true” (scroll down or use the filter to find it)
- You change “network.http.proxy.pipelining” to “true”
- Change “network.http.pipelining.maxrequests” to some number like 30 (this means it will make 30 requests simultaneously) and finally
- Right-click anywhere and select New-> Integer. Name it “nglayout.initialpaint.delay” and set its value to “0” (This sets the amount of time the browser waits before it acts on information it receives to 0).
Be aware that this trick only works if you are on a broadband connection – dial-up users are still stuck with a slow connection I’m afraid!
Via Podz
#5 is obsolote since many versions
There’s a cool plugin to manage the rest, called “TweakNetwork”
I wonder does that have any effect on the target’s site stats?
Yes, it has. It might even crash some (slow, memory-weak) webservers. On slow PC’s or slow internet connections it even reverts into the opposite and makes site access SLOWER.
There’s a quite lengthy discussion about this on webmasterworld.com: http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum21/8007.htm
Oh, and the plug-in can be found here: http://www.bitstorm.org/extensions/tweak/
The plugin makes it easy to switch between slow and fast.
In other news, did you know that Opera have made the desktop version of their browser completely free? No ads, no registration fee. Quite a good idea on their part.
Michael,
thanks for adding all that extra info – very useful.
Keith, how come you haven’t blogged about that on your own blog? How are you getting on in the North West by the way?
It went into my link log a short while back, something I’m thinking of merging into my blogging software once I get tagging up and running. However, not having direct access to the server means that thing are a bit of a pain. I’ve been contemplating converting everything over to PHP or Python and moving from being hosted with DC to some other host. I won’t be moving over to WordPress mind you: I’m still a bit weary of it from back in the days of b2, and last time I looked in internals hadn’t improved all that much from b2’s spaghetti code.
However, while I’m up here staying with my parents I’m on dial-up (ick!). That means I go online (with Tele2, who for the moment are less of a rip-off than the others), quickly look for everything I want to read (hurray for Bloglines and tabbed browsing), scan those for any links of interest, and disconnect.
Things are fine up here, though I have got a wee bit of news: I will probably be moving over to Boston in a few months. Strange as it may sound, I was headhunted by a company in the US, and I finally gave into them. I have no idea what they see in me! For the next while I’ll be staying in Ireland as getting a H1B isn’t exactly a piece of cake these days, but I’ll be flying over there occasionally for a week or so. I’ll be heading over in October to start with so I can pick up some hardware and software from them and get started on some projects.
Ahem. By that I mean that every so often, I’ll be flying over to the US and stay there for a week. Sorry about the ambiguity.
Wow! Everything is amazingly snappy now. Thanks very much for the info. However, the biggest problem I have with firefox is that it takes ages to originally start up. Any way of fixing that problem too? 🙁