Firefox 3 is undoubtedly a great browser however with a few tricks we can speed it up a lot more.
Trick 1 – Pipelining
Usually Firefox is very gentle with web servers. It waits for a response before sending in another request. Pipelining is basically the opposite. You’re instructing Firefox to not wait and instead do more requests at once. (Consider this as the browser is multi-tasking). To achieve this do the following :
In the address bar type “about:config” (without the quotes). Set the values of “network.http.pipelining” and “network.http.proxy.pipelining” to “True” and set the value of
“double-clicknetwork.http.pipelining.maxrequests” to “8”
Note: Some servers don’t support pipelining. Reverse the procedure if you have any problems.
Trick 2 – Fast Rendering
Firefox waits a certain amount of time after it starts downloading a website before it shows you what it downloaded (thus making you wait longer to start seeing something). This is called “Content Notify Interval”.
Type “about:config”, right click somewhere in the window and select New > Integer. Type “content.notify.interval” as your preference name, click OK, input “500000” and click OK again.
After you’ve done the above, right click the window again and select New > Boolean. Create a value called “content.notify.ontimer” and set it to “True”.
Trick 3 – Faster Loading
If you do not use Firefox while it’s loading a page, the page loads faster. Yes, it wasn’t your impression, it really does that. It’s called “Content Switch Threshold”. After 0.75 Seconds, Firefox goes into a low frequency interrupt mode and which makes the interface less responsive but dedicates more resources to page loading.
To fix this do the following. Type “about:config”, right click in the window and select New > Integer. Type “content.switch.threshold“ and click OK, input “250000” and click OK to do the trick.
That’s it! Enjoy a faster Firefox :)
