Firefox Speed Improvement tips

Forum: User Feedback
Topic: Firefox Speed Improvement tips
started by: ke4nt1

Posted by ke4nt1 on Mar. 27 2005,08:02

These tips really did improve my loading of several different sites
like freshmeat.net, slashdot.org, and weather.com.
I didn't find these tips listed here in any of my searches..
They may help slower machines ( or any ) get the most out of Firefox.

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 30. This means it will make 30 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.

Also, I found this site, which mentions something about a "memory leak"
in Firefox, which I've seen posted here elsewhere recently by a low-ram user.
Other tips are found here as well, and apply to DSL's firefox version same
as any other version..

< http://windowssecrets.com/041202/ >

73
ke4nt

Posted by ke4nt1 on Mar. 27 2005,08:29

Another tip that roberts shared with me ..
Try changing your default proportional font from serif to sans-serif ..

Click on Edit:Preferences
Click on the 'Fonts & Colors' box
Change the proportional font from 'Sans' to 'Sans-Serif'
Click 'OK' at the bottom of the prefs window

I've been using this on my box now for many days,
and after loading a fresh DSL install,
I miss seeing the sans-serif.. The sans seems small and blurry now..

It's just much clearer, and only slightly larger print, than the usual default.

tnx roberts..

73
ke4nt

Posted by caulktel on Mar. 27 2005,14:32

Hey Kent,

Any reason why you guys couldn't include this mod in the final 1.0 release?

Posted by ke4nt1 on Mar. 28 2005,08:17

well...

we're always thinking of ways to improve the base .iso ...

I just wanted to throw this out to the userbase,
and get some feedback on any issues, or pros/cons
before even suggesting that it become part of the main distro.

How do these couple of tips work for you ?

73
ke4nt

Posted by jshaw on Mar. 28 2005,09:35

ke4nt,

I haven't tried the pipelining changes, but I have tried the paint delay, and personally I wasn't too impressed. It actually took longer to completely display pages on my 300mhz Celleron. I imagine slower computers would be hit even harder. It has something to do with the page being redrawn when more information is received and the slower computers take a lot longer on each redraw, so waiting 1/4 second to begin displaying the page actually speeds things up a bit. Lately I tried it on my 2200+ and I still prefer the default setting. Besides, is 1/4 second that long of a wait?

josh

Posted by adssse on Mar. 30 2005,02:00

Just tried the pipelining ones here on the school computer and it seems to work pretty well. Thanks for the tip.

Posted by // Enable http compression: comm on Mar. 30 2005,03:34

In case anyone wonders:
The about:config is edited by double clicking on an item, and Firefox will then bring up a box for you to enter your value. If you have changed one of these, the line in about:config will be bold. There is a way to hard-code any changes into a master copy for remastering purposes, but if one saves your personal settings, that would do.
Also on the pipelining settings:
look at the file /greprefs/all.js
This section:

Code Sample

// Enable http compression: comment this out in case of problems with 1.1
// NOTE: support for "compress" has been disabled per bug 196406.
pref("network.http.accept-encoding" ,"gzip,deflate");

pref("network.http.pipelining" , false);
pref("network.http.proxy.pipelining", false);

// Max number of requests in the pipeline
pref("network.http.pipelining.maxrequests" , 4);

---
There you can see the defaults for Firefox 1.01
If the file is edited and placed in the master copy, then that's what you get each
time Firefox starts. I suppose they settled on "4" to suit all kinds of network speeds. (Dialup, maybe?)
I wonder if changing that to "30" would do fine on broadband.
Just some thoughts.

Posted by Rapidweather on Mar. 31 2005,02:15

That was me. I forgot to log in.