Firefox at the speed of lightning

General

To increase the speed at which the Firefox web browser loads pages, here’s an advanced tweak that will supercharge your web surfing.

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The procedure is called pipelining. It allows the web browser to open multiple connections to a destination web site and pull down content faster. It cuts into the page load time.

You can think of this technique like fetching food from a buffet. Usually, you go up with one plate, load it up, only to come back later to refill it. Pipelining lets you send up all your children with a plate each to fill it and bring it back to you.

Now a warning: Using pipelining is greedy. Imagine what would happen to the buffet if you sent up 30 kids (same goes for web servers). That said, here’s how to do it:

First, type “about:config” into the Firefox address bar and hit return. You’ll see a bunch of weird settings. 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 speeds up page loading.

Next, edit the entries as follows:

  • Set “network.http.pipelining” to “true” by right-clicking on it and choosing “Toggle“.
  • Set “network.http.proxy.pipelining” to “true“
  • Set “network.http.pipelining.maxrequests” to some number like 30. This means it will make 30 requests at once.
  • Then 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 high-speed broadband connection, you’ll load pages much faster now when you browse the web with Firefox!