HOWTO: Speedup Firefox in 5 easy steps

These are some basic tweaks to speed up Firefox that have been tried and true for some time now.  I haven’t seen these collected in one place recently, so if you have Firefox and want to improve its performance, try these steps.  If you have a broadband connection (who doesn’t?), you can speed up your page loads considerably using these steps.   Basically you’re allowing Firefox to load multiple things on a page instead of one at a time. By default, it’s optimized for dialup connections (lowest common denominator) so here’s what you need to do to fix that.

1. Type “about:config” into the address bar and hit return. Type “network.http” in the filter field, and change the following settings (double-click on them to change them):
2. Set “network.http.pipelining” to “true”
3. Set “network.http.proxy.pipelining” to “true”
4. Set “network.http.pipelining.maxrequests” to 8 (recommended by Firefox devs)
5. 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.  With it set to zero the page just pops up, it’s a dramatic change.

So give those a go, and don’t stop there, there’s plenty of Firefox add-ons to download and explore with; whatever you want to do online, there’s likely an add-on that’ll make it easier/better/faster.