Firefox speed boost

[wgiese]

Stumbled across this in a Slashdot post - works pretty well. Firefox already renders pretty dang fast, but these mods make a big difference.

Type "about:config" in your FireFox address bar. The settings you're looking for are:

1.) network.http.pipelining
2.) network.http.pipelining.firstrequest
3.) network.http.pipelining.maxrequests
4.) network.http.proxy.pipelining

Right click each setting, select modify. Set 1,2 and 4 to true, 3 to 8.

What this does:

By default, Firefox (and most other browsers) make a connection to target web/proxy server for each web component that gets downloaded - if a page has numerous images, javascripts, stylesheets, etc, each of these generates a new web/proxy server connection.

Pipelining, which is what you enable by making the above tweaks, allows multiple downloads to happen for a single web server connection. Since the connection is often the most time-consuming portion of a web page load, this can dramatically speed things up when a page has large numbers of downloadable elements.

From what I read today, it appears these settings are not enabled by default for compatibility reasons; certain older web and proxy servers don't render things correctly when pipelining is enabled. However, these servers/proxies are evidently very far and few between - consensus seems to be, that the performance boost is worth the small risk.

I've been surfing all day with these new settings, and things are way faster - no problems yet.

[Spathiphyllum]

Opera, Mozilla, and Netscape (by extension) have had this feature for some time now, too. The warning has been that it is an experimental feature but it is a feature that has been available for well over a year.

[Vin DSL]

Nice!

BTW, if you type 'network' in the filter box, it saves a lot of scrolling...

[Chappy]

Nice, very nice! A considerable improvement... Thanks!

[Chappy]

Okay, so I made the changes and they worked great. Then, I saw in Slashzilla that Firefox 0.9 RC is now out. Of course I had to try it out and have spent the last little while regaining some of my old settings. Anyway, all the settings that you point to in the first post in this thread are presesnt in the new Firefox except for setting #2,

network.http.pipelining.firstrequest

It is not listed at all that I saw. All the other settings were changed as per your instructions and it seemed to work fine.

[mattsiegman]

RC .9 doesn't seem to have the setting