I forgot all about this until I found it while looking for ways to make FireFox 1.5 just a little faster. This still works in 1.5.0.7, and it makes an incredible difference.

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FireFox on Steroids

The beta for Mozilla Firefox was released quite some time ago, with the official release back in November. For those who have it most likely use it for the tabbed browsing feature to switch back and forth between multiple web pages.

You may have noticed that the browser will make one request to a web page at a time, as do most web browsers currently on the internet. This is due to Firefox's configuration for the pipelines, which you can take advantage of that by making some simple modifications to its configuration file.

First in the URL bar, Type "about:config". This will bring up a list of commands and variables you can edit.

The second step is to put "network.http.pipelining" in the filter and change the value to "true".

After that you will want to put "network.http.proxy.pipelining" in the filter.

Like the last one, make that value set to "true" also.

The next thing you want to do is locate "network.http.pipelining.maxrequests" and change the value to some number higher, if you were to set it to 10, it would make up to 10 requests at once. (Note: I've set mine to 30)

The last step is to right click anywhere and select "New" then "Integer". Name it "nglayout.initialpaint.delay" and make its value "0". This will make the browser respond faster on the information of the websites it receives.

Close out FireFox (FireFox is known to not always close properly; view the Task Manager to ensure it closed out completely) and re-open it and enjoy the new mega speed!

Conclusion

That's all there is to it, and if you're on a broadband connection your page load will be at least 2-3 times faster then previously. This is just the one of the many advantages that Firefox has over Internet Explorer. While Internet Explorer still has this type of capability, though you will notice the speed in FireFox more. Some of the other features include tabbed browser windows for easier browsing, built in pop up blocker that is much better than Internet Explorer's, and other great features not found in IE. There are also many plugins, one of them being Adblock that has the ability to block iframe, images, swf, and other embedded ads. Another nice feature about this browser is that I have not received a single piece of SpyWare from a site while using it, although I'm not out looking for them either. More and more people are downloading this awesome browser every day, if you don't have it--I highly recommend you Join them.

Yeah, the fasterfox plugin basically simulates all these options.

Yup, FasterFox Also puts a GUI on the caching settings so you can disable that fastback thing that tends to eat memory.

I found that using FasterFox actually slowed up FireFox and made it less stable . I also found that the speed improvements with the about:config seemed to be better than FasterFox, but to be fair that was a good long while ago.

Speaking of FireFox who's excited about FireFox 2?


Alex

Oh I'm excited. The GUI looks really clean and sexy.

AFAIK, Fasterfox is just a GUI for the settings? Shouldn't make it any less stable...

Anyway, I'm running FF2 now and I like it Not the best, but I like it.