At some point in your internet life, I'm sure you've wondered how to speed up your connection. Myself, I prefer to take the free approach wherever possible, so today I am going to show you how to get your Firefox install trucking along at a much happier pace. Without further delay...
First things first, you should be doing this in another tab, that way you can make your changes and check back here to see what the next change to make is (just in case you didn't know, you can press CTRL+T to open a new tab). So go ahead and open yourself a new tab, and in the address bar (F6) you want to type in
about:config
After continuing past the warning that will more than likely show up, you will be confronted with a staggering amount of information and options. Welcome to the in-browser method of editing Firefox's configuration files. This is a fairly simple procedure so I won't go into too much detail, but if you notice the filter box at the top of the webpage, you will be using that to make to locate the lines you need to change, or maybe enter if they don't already exsist. So for starters, let's make this list a bit more manageable, shall we?
Filter for: pipe
Once you filter for pipe, it should narrow down to just a few options, quite possibly even less then I describe here, but not to worry, Firefox is nice and easy to add new rules to. First things first, look for the following options:
network.http.pipelining------------------------>Set to true
network.http.pipelining.firstrequest------------------------>Set to true
network.http.pipelining.maxrequests ------------------------>Set to 32
network.http.proxy.pipelining------------------------>Set to true
Once you have found the entry I've outlined, doubleclick on it to change it from the default to what I outlined here. If any of them are not present, you just need to right click in the window and go to NEW, then pick the type of entry. A string entry is used when your value is in words or letters, use integer if you are adding a number, and finally use boolean if you have a yes/no option to pass in.
More things to change/add are the following:
nglayout.initialpaint.delay------------------------>Set to 0
ui.submenuDelay------------------------>Set to 0
plugin.expose_full_path------------------------>Set to true
content.notify.backoffcount------------------------>Set to 5
browser.cache.memory.capacity------------------------>*********
(Please note that with this paticular entry, you will have to make a judgement call based on how much memory you have in your computer. If you have around a gigabyte of RAM, I'd recommend setting this to something 49152. If you've got even less, you might want to consider 24576. I'm writing this on a notebook with 2 gigs of RAM, so I use 65536. If you find your computer slow to a crawl after applying these settings, you've set this too high, turn it down to something your computer will more readily accept.)
I think I've given you enough changes to have a fairly noticable change in your browsing speed. To apply these changes, you'll need to quit and restart Firefox. Once you've done that, you'll notice those changes you made kick in instantly. Enjoy your speedy "new" connection!
