WoofyDugfock
Group: Members
Posts: 146
Joined: Sep. 2004 |
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Posted: May 19 2005,12:47 |
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You may have noticed that Firefox can seem slow to render pages, and slow to launch & open on that first page. It's one reason I use Dillo a lot. I had noticed this as compared with the awful IE under Windows.
According to Linux Journal May 2005 p88, FF organizes some of the page layout before viewing any part of the page. Similarly, FF "buffers up the incoming the incoming raw network content before it bothers to break those bytes down into something ready for display".
The following hacks are paraphrased from LJ (ibid.) and made a bit more explicit instruction-wise. I have found them to be NICE. The first could in theory shave up to 0.25 sec off the response time.
1. Type about:config in the url slot - this will open a long user interface to most of FF's mysterious deep prefs.
2. The prefs we want to change are not there in FF under DSL. To add them, right-click anywhere on the about:config interface --> new -->name, and enter: --> nglayout.initialpaint.delay --> integer --> 0 (ie numeral zero).
3. Similarly, right-click again and add the following new preference: --> content.notify.interval --> integer --> 5000
Both hacks should (?) probably only be done by those with reasonable processors - the second will make the cpu work hard. I use a p3 and they worked well on that. According to the FF website, changes entered in about:config take effect immediately.
On fast processors the '5000' can be decreased further in steps while watching your processor with 'top' to see how it goes (on p3 800Mhz I've tried going down to 3000 = cpu occassionally spikes at 70% but averages 25%).
Many thanks to Linux Journal.
-------------- "We don't need no stinkin' Windows"
http://news.zdnet.co.uk/software/linuxunix/0,39020390,39149796,00.htm
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