Boost Firefox Speed

Heres a simple trick which you can do to boost the speed of your Mozilla Firefox browser. This trick works fine if you have a broad band internet connection. All you need to do is follow the following simple steps:

• Open Mozilla Firefox.
• Type down "about:config" in the address bar.
• A list of entries will show up. Scroll down and locate the following key entries;
• network.http.pipelining
• network.http.proxy.pipelining
• network.http.pipelining.maxrequests
• Alter the keys 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 one go
• The final step is, right-click anywhere within the list and select New > Integer. An input box will show up. Name it "nglayout.initialpaint.delay" and set its value to "0". This value is the time that the browser waits before it acts on information it recieves.
• Restart Firefox, You are done!
  

Now you will experience faster web page loading in Firefox of almost 300% of your initial speed.


How it works?
Imagine your doctor gives you separate prescriptions for three different medicines. You go to the local pharmacy and give the first prescription note to the pharmacist. While preparing your medicine, waiting for the medicine label and the invoice to print, the pharmacist has no opportunity to have a look at the second prescription and anticipate what it takes to prepare it. Only after you receive the first medicine, you hand over the second prescription. Again you wait until you get that second medicine, before you finally give the third prescription. Although of course an over-simplification of the technological background processes, this trivial example resembles to a great extent what would happen when a traditional web server would handle multiple requests from a non-pipelining browser to fetch data for display on a web page.

Now choose the second option which is more efficient: Go to the pharmacy with the three prescriptions. You hand over all three prescriptions to the pharmacist. The pharmacist prepares your medicines, uses intermittent waiting times to get started on the next prescription and then hands all three medicines over back to you when he/she is done.

This is exactly what a web server does that is aware of HTTP pipelining. Pages load considerably faster because the browser is capable of handling multiple, subsequent requests and because the browser is capable of processing multiple, subsequent responses.