Originally posted by: BD2003
Originally posted by: ultravox
Here's something for broadband people that will really speed Firefox up:
1.Type "about:config" into the address bar and hit return.
Scroll down and look for the following entries:
network.http.pipelining
network.http.proxy.pipelining
network.http.pipelining.maxrequests
Normally the browser will make one request to a web page at a time. When you enable pipelining it will make several at once, which really speeds up page loading.
2. Alter the entries as follows:
Set "network.http.pipelining" to "true"
Set "network.http.proxy.pipelining" to "true"
Set "network.http.pipelining.maxrequests" to some number like 35.
This means it will make 35 requests at once.
3. Lastly 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. If you're using a broadband connection you'll load pages MUCH faster now!
It's easier to just download the extension "fasterfox", which does all of the exact same things, just with a nice UI and all, and makes it easier to test the effects of the speedups.
The network ones speed up the rate of download, but not the rate of rendering, or cpu/mem usage, unfortunately. Pipelining is generally good, although a rare website has a problem with it, which is why it's off by default. I wouldn't recommend putting the max requests as high as 35- you might be pulling in 35 streams at once (images etc), but that will only speed you up if you are REALLY bottlenecked. Leave it at 8-16 or less, unless you have a ton of bandwidth, and really fast cpu/memory.
You can only download as fast as you have bandwidth for, you can either download 30 things in 5 seconds, twice. Or download all 60 at once, over 10 seconds. It's not going to be much faster in the end past a certain point of diminishing returns, and will eventually become counter-productive.
I definitely do not recommend to set the inital paint to 0. The setting determines how long to wait before rendering the new page, and it's set to wait for a very good reason. If you set it to 0, it will repaint before ANY data has come in, therefore every single click will be met with a white screen, before it starts loading. That alone annoys me. Secondly, the primary reason it waits is so that it can get enough data that it can render the page without having to constantly reformat it as new tables, multiple large images, etc come in, which is cpu intensive, and FF does not handle this particularly well at all. Especially if it has to reformat the page a million times because it's starting from a blank canvas. You can barely scroll around while its doing so, on a large complicated page. FF seems more intent to get all the data loaded and formatted before you can smoothly use it, at the expense of responsiveness, which probably has a lot to do with why the inital delay is so high in the first place.
If you set it to 0, you might perceive it being faster because it blinks to white so fast, and you can see it all coming in. But if you set it to a more reasonable value, it'll have enough data, that it'll have less work to do when it eventually does begin to render, speeding you up. Depending on your bandwidth and CPU, I'd set it from a minimum 100 (1/10th of a sec, still very fast). I usually go for 200-250ms. The default is set at 1000ms, which is far too safe in my opinion, but is a good number for slower computers.
Best thing to do is to get fasterfox, which has a built in timer, and an easy way to clear the cache, so you can see for yourself the effects the tweaks has.
And all that being said, Opera is still at least twice as fast.
In fact, FF 2.0 is probably the slowest one they've put out! See here:
http://www.howtocreate.co.uk/browserSpeed.html
The latest Opera starts up several times faster, renders and runs scripts 2-3 times faster, loads images multiple images at a time 50% faster, and goes back/forward through history
600% faster.
But extensions still kick ass.
Can't have it all.
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