Speed up Firefox with these tweaks
Computers February 25th, 2005Does Firefox seem way slower than Internet Explorer to you? Well it certainly is out of the box. I’m not sure why they don’t make the following settings default but check these out. They may change your opinion of the browser.
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Type “about:config” in your firefox address bar.
Search for the following settings:
1. network.http.pipelining
Set to true
2. network.http.pipelining.firstrequest
Set to true
3. network.http.pipelining.maxrequests
Set to 32
4. network.http.proxy.pipelining
Set to true
5. nglayout.initialpaint.delay
Set to 0
Its very likely that you won’t have an entry for network.http.pipelining.firstrequest. Thats ok. Just add one.
Right-click on the preferences list, select ‘New’ then select ‘Boolean’
On the first prompt, type:
network.http.pipelining.firstrequest
On the second prompt, set it to ‘true’
Its also likely that you won’t have an entry for nglayout.initialpaint.delay
Right-click on the preferences list, select ‘New’ then select ‘Integer’
On the first prompt, type:
nglayout.initialpaint.delay
On the second prompt, set it to ‘0′
Thanks to MatthewHSE and rise2it of WebmasterWorld for these settings. Thanks to rona for heads up on the nglayout.initialpaint.delay also not being present. Firefox is way faster for me and has enabled me to finally bail on IE.
How does it help? These are Matthew’s words:
Enabling the pipelining features allows the browser to make multiple requests to the server at the same time. The “maxrequests” is the maximum number of requests it will send at once. I’ve heard that 8 is the most it will send at once, but setting it higher won’t hurt, just in case. The initialpaint.delay is the length of time (in milliseconds) after the server response before the browser begins to paint the page.








March 2nd, 2005 at 5:29 am
Stumbled upon your blog this morning.
Found the CPanel/PHP/Curl fix I had been hunting for, fixed (I hope) the crippling problem I have been having with Firefox freezing while I download files (seems better so far).
Remember the “Clapton is God” graffiti? Right now I am thinking “Tony Spencer is God”.
To quote the Governor of California “I’ll be back.”
Thanks for the great tips!
July 10th, 2005 at 3:56 am
Holy crap! This made my FF smokin fast! Thanks!
September 23rd, 2005 at 8:41 pm
hey i messed up and made a boolean string for nglayout.initialpaint.delay and i can’t delete it or modify it properly
any suggestions?
November 20th, 2005 at 12:10 am
hello - i just did these things and firefox crashed as usual.
firefox used to be excellent, top of its class… but now, it’s as bad or worse than bill’s creations. what is worse is that this has been happening for months and no fix has come out. i am not using switchproxy (which is what some people are using that seems to be causing the problems) as one of my extensions.
my extensions are:
stumbleupon
forecastfox
adblock
gmail notifier
flashblock
googlebar
resizeable text area
i have switched to opera now for general browsing but stumbleupon doesn’t have a downloadable opera version, so i’m stuck with disease ridden i.e. or buggy (and now infinitely annoying) firefox.
any help would be appreciated - i created a new profile thinking perhaps that would sort out the problems… nope.
February 27th, 2007 at 9:02 pm
I’m a non-techie, although I can follow your instructions. What I want to know is, will there be any problems implementing the changes? Do I need enough memory or something? What could possibly go wrong?
March 3rd, 2007 at 4:10 am
The Firefox extension called “FasterFox” did all of this for me.
March 3rd, 2007 at 6:21 am
May thanks. Certainly speeded my FF up.
March 6th, 2007 at 12:33 pm
Note to Jane - disable or remove AdBlock. That worked for my crashing FF.
December 22nd, 2007 at 4:47 am
Another note to Jane - When you installed Mozilla Firefox they should have put a Safe Mode shortcut in Start - All Programs - Mozilla Firefox. This will start FF without any extensions. If it runs acceptably fast with this shortcut then the problem is in one or more of the extensions (add-ons).
February 11th, 2008 at 11:26 pm
Thanks mate! I’m using Firefox 3 Beta 2 and I thought it couldn’t get any faster, but with your tweaks they did!!
Thanks a million. =)
May 24th, 2008 at 10:22 am
This is by far the fastest I have ever seen Firefox fly!!! Finally, the name follow function with this info!!!!
Great tip with adding new entries!!!!
Looks like safari is going to the trash!!!
June 21st, 2008 at 7:03 am
unbelievable speed. thanks!
June 21st, 2008 at 10:51 pm
all i gotta say is, SICKNESS!
June 22nd, 2008 at 6:23 am
Hey thanks, Tony and friends. I downloaded Firefox 3 and was very disappointed with all the hanging and crashing. But your tips have turned my little laptop into a real Net blazer! I could feel the restrictions relieving in the browser as I made the final changes. Amazing stuff.
July 5th, 2008 at 8:36 am
One thing you might want to also add is that after doing the NGLayout tweat they need to then do the content.notify.interval and set that to 0 as well.
Hope that helps a little more
July 7th, 2008 at 4:42 am
a milliion thanks..
wow, you aare so knowledgeble
and you helped me make my mind taking the “Computer Hardware and Operating Systems” course next year.lols.
July 9th, 2008 at 11:08 pm
i don’t know if this isn’t useful for macs, but i did everything you said to do, now my FF keeps crashing every couple seconds. *sighs*
July 29th, 2008 at 5:22 pm
Hey,
I just switched over to this from IE7 it is really nice. 1 question though if Firefox was not better than MS no one complains about it. if MS makes one mistake the whole world stop revolving and everyone protests.
August 6th, 2008 at 6:19 pm
I had been using Firefox 2 and was pretty happy with the performance. I recently upgraded to FF 3 and the drop in speed was painfully obvious. The same page took significantly longer to load and refresh. I stumbled on your blog while Googling and tried the “FasterFox” add-on suggested by Phil. Thanks Phil, my FireFox is amazingly fast now.
~Nagendra
August 19th, 2008 at 9:00 pm
I just tried to get fasterfox — there is no version at mozilla or the developers site that is compatible with firefox 3.0.1. i tried to install anyway and firefox rejected it because it was “not compatible!”
September 3rd, 2008 at 10:37 am
Just a problem with
nglayout.initialpaint.delay
it was already in my list, and I changed the value from 600 to 0 as required, but when I close and reopen FF, the value is set back to 600. Other boolean values are NOT reset after reopening. What can I do? Is there a “Save” feature or something?