Another Word for Nerd

I’ve collected a few tips on speeding up the Mozilla FireFox web browser.

First, if you’re on a Mac, get a G4-Optimized Build, including the improved form widgets.

There are G5-Optimized Builds, but they’re not kept as up-to-date.

If you’re using Windows, grab one of Moox’s x86-Optimized Builds.

In the URL bar, type about:config and press ENTER/RETURN. This will bring up the configuration “menu” where you can change certain parameters. Some of the optimized builds will have these set already, but it won’t hurt to check. I use the following settings (for a broadband connection):

network.http.max-connections 48
network.http.max-connections-per-server 16
network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-proxy 8
network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-server 4
network.http.pipelining true
network.http.pipelining.maxrequests 8
network.http.proxy.pipelining true
network.http.request.timeout 300

MozillaZine has an annotated list of all the about:config entries, and the Tweak Network Settings extension will do a lot of this for you automatically.

Also see these pages with more tips and tricks:

• How To Make Firefox Faster
• Firefox Browser Hacking
• Firefox Tweak Guide - Performance Settings
• Mozillazine Forums - Firefox Tuning
• Geek Style: Optimizing Mozilla Firebird

This entry was posted on Friday, December 24th, 2004 at 12:11 pm
Categories: general. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.