Top Tweaks to Speeding Up Firefox

on
In Firefox 1.x - 2.x you might have noticed that after opening several tabs and browsing a while system memory starts to be eaten up a lot and performance start degrading a little.
Here are some not so obvious tweaks to speeding up your internet browsing and improving performance.

Enable Pipelining
By default, the pipelining option is turned off in Firefox. By enabling it you can send several requests to a Web server at a time, rather than sending them one by one.
  1. Type about:config into your address bar and hit Enter.


  2. In the Filter text box, at the top of the page, type network.http. A list of settings appears, as you can see in the nearby figure.
  3. Double-click the "network.http.pipelining" setting, to change it to true.
  4. Double-click the "network.http.proxy.pipelining" setting, to change it to true.
  5. Double-click the "network.http.pipelining.maxrequests" setting, and in the text box that appears, type in 8 and click OK.
Increase / Decrease Amount of Memory Used

One tweak you might want to try is adjusting the amount of RAM Firefox uses.
  1. Type about:config into your address bar and hit Enter.
  2. In the Filter text box, at the top of the page, type browser.cache.
  3. Double-click the "browser.cache.memory.capacity" entry.
  4. The default is 50000. If you don't have a lot of memory on your system, for example, between 512MB and 1GB, change the number to 15000 and click OK.
Reduce Unnecessary CPU Cycles and Bandwidth Usage

Firefox by default download pages from links you are not always visiting. Its called link prefetching. A webpage hints to the browser that certain pages are likely to be visited, so the browser downloads them immediately so they can be displayed immediately when the user requests it. But if you dont actually click the link this means you used up bandwidth and CPU cycles to store history for web page you may not ever view.

In the Filter text box, at the top of the page, type network.prefetch-next and set the value key to false.
Decrease the Wait Time

A hidden trick that reduces the number of milliseconds to wait before first displaying a page is to create create a new config option.

Right-click anywhere in the about:config screen

and select New-> Integer.

Name it "nglayout.initialpaint.delay" , then press OK.









Next screen set its value to "0".


This value is the amount of time the browser waits before it acts on information it receives.