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Are there some tricks to speed up Firefox?

Dave, I've been using Firefox for a few months and really like it, but I just heard that there are some tweaks you can make to the program that actually speed it up quite a bit. Can you tell me how to make those adjustments and help me get the fastest possible Web surfing experience?

Dave's Answer:

There are indeed a number of different adjustments you can make to Firefox that can improve its performance, the first and most important of which is to always make sure that you have the very latest version on your system. Pop over to get Firefox and download it right now.

Done?

Good. Now, enter the URL about:config and then type in "network.http" to the browser's "filter" function to identify the following entries:

network.http.pipelining
network.http.proxy.pipelining
network.http.pipelining.maxrequests

If your Firefox is set up like mine, the first two will be set to "false". Change them to "true" and then enter a value like 20 for maxrequests.

These will make the browser use your network connection more efficiently (or, depending on your perspective, more aggressively) which should visibly speed up rendering pages in the browser.

There's a lot more you can learn if you pop over to Mozillazine's Firefox Tuning discussion, if you really want to fine-tune your Web browsing experience.

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Comments

Hi there,

If you are using Windows XP, you can load Firefox faster by adding it to your XP prefetch features at Firefox application shortcuts:

"C:\.....\Firefox.exe" /prefetch:1

Also you can do that following for all platform:

1. Install TweakNetwork extension from mozilla.org, select Power profile.
2. If you are using direct Internet connection, change your firefox to Automatic Proxy Configuration under Connection of your General Preference to "http://cache:8080"

Good luck!

Posted by: David Voo at February 6, 2005 8:01 AM

This happens primarily when I use Firefox to visit a newspaper's online site that has multiple links to different stories. After reading an article and clicking the Back button, it returns me to the top of the homepage rather than to where the article link was located. This is not only annoying but takes time to scroll back through all the other links. Is there a tweak in Firefox to prevent this? Thanks for the help.

Posted by: Les Parnacott at February 9, 2005 12:19 PM

Les, I surmise that's more a function of how the Web site itself is structured: I've noticed that some sites essentially trash the back button in any browser...

Posted by: Dave Taylor at February 9, 2005 3:25 PM

Does your:
network.http.pipelining
network.http.proxy.pipelining
network.http.pipelining.maxrequests

tip also work in Mozilla! I used it in Mozilla 1.7.5 to see what happen!

Posted by: Robert Schulz at February 9, 2005 8:00 PM

Updating my last coment:

The speedup tip didn't work for me! Not only did it take longer for the pages to load but in testing various web page I noticed a number of broken images. To verify the problem I loaded the same pages in IE without problems. Since then I reversed the setting and both Firefox and Mozilla display image properly again.

Posted by: Robert Schulz at February 10, 2005 6:01 AM

Robert, sorry it didn't work for you, but I'm not entirely surprised. That's doubtless why the default settings for Firefox don't have pipelining enabled.

Posted by: Dave Taylor at February 10, 2005 2:58 PM

Just Type �about:config� into the address bar and hit return
Where is this address bar in Firefox?

Posted by: steve zimmett at August 2, 2005 12:29 PM

I have to say setting the value to anything greater than 4 is useless. The pipelining idea is a huge myth. Most sites block more than a couple of requests from one ip, so setting anything too high will have no effect at all. I mean if you could do 20 requests to one website then FF users will bring most websites to its knees.

Posted by: Firefox User at November 1, 2006 2:18 PM

The maximum number of pipelining firefox and afaik the underlying technology from the webserver side supports are 8! So setting this any higher than 8 has no effect whatsoever. 20 is ridiculous anyways since it breaks up the files to download into 20 streams while your connection might be fast enough to download everything in one sec through one pipe you spread it out over 20 which would in the best case not speed things up, in the worst case slow things down dramatically.

Posted by: Andre at May 21, 2007 7:14 AM

worked! thanks

Posted by: collector at July 10, 2008 8:39 AM

The max pipelining requests field is capped at '8' it will not go higher so there is no point settng it to 20 or something like that.... see http://www.nettechguide.com/how-to-speed-up-firefox-page-loading-times for more info

Posted by: tech help guy at September 13, 2008 12:06 PM

I have a lot to say, but ...

I have a lot to say, and questions of my own for that matter, but most of all I'd like to say thank you for all your efforts on this Web site by buying you a chai!

I do have a comment, now that you mention it!