Surf Like a Madman! Increase your FireFox Surfing Speed
24 January 2008
FireFox looks to be the browser of choice for most bloggers. It runs circles around Internet Explorer and to me is just much easier to use.
If you haven’t switched to FireFox I strongly suggest you take it for a spin.
FireFox is great as you can use multiple tabs and surf like mad all within the comfort of one window.
It has a sweet Session Restore feature that is great when your computer bugs out on you, you can just restart FireFox and it will bring up all the last
pages you were viewing, no need to retrace your steps to figure out what you were looking at last. Very convenient!
And now, to add to all that, there are some sweet tweaks you can perform that will increase your FireFox surfing speeds up to %20!
FireFox is installed with default settings for a dial-up connection.. Why is this? Who knows, but with the majority of internet users now using high-speed broadband connections, you need to optimize FireFox to take advantage of this extra bandwidth.
So use these following steps to juice up your FireFox browser, and surf like a madman!
1. Type “about:config” into the address bar and hit return.
Type “network.http” in the filter field, and change the following settings (double-click on them to change them):
2. Set “network.http.pipelining” to “true”
3. Set “network.http.proxy.pipelining” to “true”
4. Set “network.http.pipelining.maxrequests” to 30. This will allow it to make 30 requests at one time. Originally I tried 100 here and it didn’t seem to help. When I went with
30 I noticed an improvement. ** Update 8 is actually recommended by Firefox **
5. Right-click anywhere and select New-> Integer. Name it “nglayout.initialpaint.delay” and set its value to “0″. This value is the amount of time the browser waits before it
acts on information it receives.
Leave a comment and let me know how much of a speed improvement you get, I am curious to see if it is the same for everyone of if it depends on other factors. With these tweaks, I had a marked 20% increase in surf speed.
If you have any trouble setting this up, no worries, just leave a comment and I will step you through the process. By the way, thats what GetSomeComputerHelp is all about. Getting you Help when you need it… Get Some!
on January 25th, 2008 at 4:51 am
Instant difference, wow… thanks!
on January 25th, 2008 at 4:54 am
Glad it helped you out! Check back often for more tips?
on January 25th, 2008 at 2:31 pm
Great tip! I will have to try that out! Thanks!
on January 27th, 2008 at 3:44 am
Hey, I am a computer Dummy and I was able to follow your instructions with no problems. And it worked great! Thanks.
on January 27th, 2008 at 9:26 am
For the brave bloggers out there, I would recommend using Firefox 3 beta. The new subtle changes to the interface takes a little time to get used to, but the speed improvements are worth it. Also, it seems like the Mozilla team has addressed most of the memory leaks as well.
on February 22nd, 2008 at 2:14 am
You’ve opened the pandora’s box now, most people had no clue they had such extensive control of their own browsers.
Nice tips!
on August 20th, 2008 at 7:10 am
Good