Your browser might be making you slow. Tips for making Firefox faster.

So last night I wrote a pretty angry post about how I believe the internet should be much faster and how the American people are being cheated out of time and sanity and all that, so I did a little research to see if there were some things I could do to increase the speed of my current setup.

I use Firefox as my main web browser, so I googled “tips for making firefox faster”.  Turns out there are lots of things you can do to crank up the performance of your web browser.  I haven’t checked for similar tips for other browsers, but I’m sure they’re out there as well.

Here’s what I did to make my browsing experience much faster

I enabled pipelining. When your browser calls up a webpage, it typically will send a request, then wait for the answer, then it will send another request, and so on… Well if you enable pipelining, your browser can keep requesting the page over even if it hasn’t received a response yet.  This trick alone made pages load much much faster.  Here’s how to do it…

1. Type about:config into the address bar and hit enter.  There will be a screen that says you might void your warranty, but I just hit ‘okay’ since I don’t understand how free software could possibly have that good of a warranty.  This pulls up a long list of setting that govern how your browser performs.
2. Find the file labeled network.http.pipelining click on it so instead of ‘false’ it reads ‘true’
3. Find the file labeled network.http.proxy.pipelining click on it so instead of ‘false’ it reads ‘true’
4. Find the file labeled network.http.pipelining.maxrequests.  Double click the file and it will pull up the number 1 that you will need to change.  I read recommendations for anywhere between 8 and 30.  This is how many times it will call for a page without hearing a response.  Naturally I picked 30, but if you’re scared you can just pick 8.

I set the pages to render quickly. Do you ever notice that when a large webpage loads it will load part of the content, then another part, then another part, etc.  Well, did you ever wish that it would just get it over with already!?   This is the fix.  After I did this, pages typically loaded in 1 or 2 parts instead of 5 or 10, which I greatly appreciated.

1. Go to the about:config screen again.
2. Right click somewhere in the window and select New > Integer.
3. Type content.notify.interval as your preference name.
4. Enter 500000 and click OK again.
5. Right-click again in the window and select New > Boolean. Create a value called content.notify.ontimer and set it to True.

Enable faster loading. This was pretty amazing as well.  Do you ever notice how your browser gets really sluggish while you’re loading a page.  This has always been really annoying to me.  Here’s the fix.

1. Type about:config and press ‘enter’.
2. Right-click in the window and select New > Integer.
3. Type content.switch.threshold, click OK
4. Enter 250000 and click OK to finish.

Increase the cache size. Your browser stores certain elements of webpages you visit frequently in a cache so that it can load the page more quickly.  Bigger cache = more stuff that can be called up more quickly.  This works best if you have 2+ gigs of RAM on your machine.

1. Type about:config and press ‘enter’.
2. Right-click anywhere in the window and select New > Integer.
3. Type browser.cache.memory.capacity, click ‘ok’.
4. Enter 65536 and click ‘ok’.
5. Restart your browser.

I got a lot of these tips from TechRadar.com, they had a few others as well, but they were pretty specialized and not really great for most modern web users (just my opinion).  Anyway, enjoy a faster experience on the web and let me know in the comments if you have any questions.