8 hacks to make Firefox ridiculously fast
So I’ve come across a few tips for speeding up firefox. I’ve included the ones I feel should be the most valuable or stable. These can be added by tweaking the about:config file or creating a user.js file in your user profile folder. Be careful and use at your own risk!
Enable pipelining
Browsers are normally very polite, sending a request to a server then waiting for a response before continuing. Pipelining is a more aggressive technique that lets them send multiple requests before any responses are received, often reducing page download times.To enable it, type about:config in the address bar, double-click network.http.pipelining and network.http.proxy.pipelining so their values are set to true, then double-click network.http.pipelining.maxrequests and set this to 8.
Keep in mind that some servers don’t support pipelining, though, and if you regularly visit a lot of these then the tweak can actually reduce performance. Set network.http.pipelining and network.http.proxy.pipelining to false again if you have any problems.
Render quickly
Large, complex web pages can take a while to download. Firefox doesn’t want to keep you waiting, so by default will display what it’s received so far every 0.12 seconds (the “content notify interval”). While this helps the browser feel snappy, frequent redraws increase the total page load time, so a longer content notify interval will improve performance.Type about:config and press [Enter], then right-click (Apple users ctrl-click) somewhere in the window and select New > Integer. Type content.notify.interval as your preference name, click OK, enter [250000] and click OK again [default is 120000, this quote=500000, another site uses 750000]. Right-click again in the window and select New > Boolean. This time create a value called content.notify.ontimer and set it to True to finish the job.
Increase the cache size
As you browse the web so Firefox stores site images and scripts in a local memory cache, where they can be speedily retrieved if you revisit the same page. If you have plenty of RAM (2 GB of more), leave Firefox running all the time and regularly return to pages then you can improve performance by increasing this cache size.Type about:config and press [Enter], then right-click anywhere in the window and select New > Integer. Type browser.cache.memory.capacity, click OK, enter 65536 and click OK, then restart your browser to get the new, larger cache.
from:
and for a more situation-specific lists of tweaks:
http://codebetter.com/blogs/darrell.norton/archive/2005/01/28/48720.aspx